© pamela mary wesely, june 2009 - university of minnesota · 2016-05-18 · the language learning...
TRANSCRIPT
The Language Learning Motivation
of Early Adolescent French and Spanish Elementary Immersion Program Graduates
A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
BY
Pamela Mary Wesely
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Diane J. Tedick, Adviser
June, 2009
© Pamela Mary Wesely, June 2009
i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“Behind the mountain…more mountains” – Haitian proverb
One of my graduate school friends & colleagues said this to me after I finished
my defense. And it is true – going through conceptualizing, writing, and defending a
dissertation is a lot like a series of mountains, where each mountain seems like it must be
the mountain, until you get over it, and you can see the rest of the mountains behind it.
So I would like to use this space to thank the people who helped me get over the
mountains on the way to this document. Sometimes these people were holding the lines
or pointing out the handholds that would keep me moving upwards, sometimes they were
helping me to enjoy the climb, and sometimes, maybe the best of times, they were
encouraging me to look around at the view, and to realize that climbing a mountain can
be pretty exhilarating.
First here, I have to thank Diane J. Tedick, my advisor. Dee got me involved in
my graduate program nine years ago, when I took a class with her as a non-degree
student. I’m pretty sure that I would not be typing this if I had not had her as my first
professor at the University of Minnesota. Her rigorous encouragement from beginning to
end has given me structure and inspiration. She was never afraid to push me or to praise
me, and both aspects of that have been vital to my success in this program. Thank you,
Dee. I look forward to a long friendship as colleagues in the field.
I would also like to thank the members of my dissertation committee: Tara
Fortune, who never failed to give me careful and incisive advice about immersion
education and its stakeholders; Martha Bigelow, who mentored me through one of my
first research projects and my first work with student teachers; and Pat Avery, who
introduced me to social science research methodology. Other professors and mentors in
the University of Minnesota community like Susan Ranney, Connie Walker, Kimerly
Miller, and Michael Harwell have given their time and input freely, and for that I thank
them, too. My friends and colleagues in the Center for Advanced Research on Language
Acquisition (CARLA) have supported my work from the start. Kentaro Kato and the
Office of Research Consultation helped me with my statistics questions. The members of
the research seminar in 2006-2007 provided important critiques and asked me tough
questions as I crafted the pilot study for this dissertation. Thank you.
The Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship 2008-2009 and the Thesis Research Grant
awarded by the University of Minnesota’s Graduate School provided significant financial
support and important votes of confidence in my research.
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My participants, from district level administrators to individual students and
families, were of course key to the success of this study. I wish that I could thank them
all by name, but hopefully they know who they are. They have set a high standard for the
schools and individuals with whom I will conduct my research in the future; I can only
hope that I can find such helpful, cooperative, insightful individuals in other schools.
I also need to thank the people who have been holding my emotional lifelines
through this whole process. First of all, thank you to the mom support group in all of its
incarnations: Karla Stone, Magara Maeda, Candance Doerr-Stevens, Sachiko Horii, and
especially Kristi Liu. Thanks to Kristi again and Cassie Glynn, who helped me with
coding my interviews and were all too happy to talk with me about my data. Other
graduate student colleagues who have done everything from critique my surveys, to share
important readings, to simply remind me of the joys of research and scholarship,
especially: Letitia Basford, Diana Dudzik, Jill Flynn, Mary Lee Nichols, and all of my
officemates over the years in Peik 224.
I also want to thank my mom, Meridel Wesely, and dad, the late Marvin Wesely,
both of whom taught me to never, ever doubt my own intellect or capacity to work. I
miss my dad, and I wish he could have seen me accomplish this, but, as my daughter
says, he is in the sky and watching. My sister, in-laws, and other family members have
helped me to develop a faith in myself that has carried me through this process. They
have also given me both practical help and kind forgiveness because of the time that I
needed to spend on this work. Thank you. My friends outside of the University of
Minnesota, especially Elise Robinson, Anne Hendrickson, and the late Marki Talle, gave
me perspective and laughter in my journey. My colleagues at Breck School helped a
young teacher to identify the burning questions that she wanted answered about language
acquisition and her students. You gave me my start, and I thank you, too.
And finally, thank you thank you thank you to my husband, Matt Arnold, whose
generosity, love, and bravery have touched every page of this document. I wonder if I’ll
ever be able to repay you for the tremendous gifts that you have given me. Fiona and
Malcolm, you make life worth living. It’s going to be quite a journey together.
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DEDICATION
For my husband, Matt.
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ABSTRACT
This mixed methods study focuses on the transition between elementary and
middle/junior high school in one-way immersion programs in the United States.
Understanding more about this transition is important to creating immersion programs
that provide the maximum benefits to students, schools, and the community. An
exploration of students’ language learning motivation at this point of their education can
help with this understanding. The primary goal of this study is thus to investigate the L2
learning motivation of elementary immersion school graduates, with a particular focus on
issues vital to the unique context of immersion education.
Three hundred fifty-eight (358) students who had graduated from five public
elementary immersion schools in one metropolitan area were the target population. The
secondary target population was their parents. One hundred thirty-one (131) students and
their parents responded to surveys, and 33 students were interviewed. Data analysis
procedures included a theme analysis of the interview data, a statistical analysis of the
survey data, and an integrated consideration of the qualitative and quantitative findings.
Findings were organized around two topical frameworks in immersion education:
persistence and attrition in immersion programs, and developing cross-cultural
understanding in immersion students. This study found that the participating immersion
graduates’ decisions to persist in the immersion program were more based on peer
influence and their assessments of the school environment of the immersion continuation
program than any other factor. Additionally, students who demonstrated the most cross-
cultural understanding had experienced increased exposure to other cultures, languages,
v
and individuals outside of the immersion classroom. Other findings reflected the
respondents’ understandings of the nature of language and culture, their relationships
with their parents and teachers, and their many reasons and uses for learning a language.
The conclusion includes suggestions and implications for district-level
administrators, school administrators, and teachers in immersion programs.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS....................................................................................................i
DEDICATION....................................................................................................................iii
ABSTRACT.......................................................................................................................iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS....................................................................................................vi
LIST OF TABLES.............................................................................................................xii
LIST OF FIGURES..........................................................................................................xiii
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION..................................................................................1
Background and Rationale.............................................................................................1
Why Learn a Language in the United States?..........................................................1
Why Immersion Language Programs? ....................................................................2
Why Language Learning Motivation? ....................................................................4
Significance of the Problem...........................................................................................5
Research Questions........................................................................................................7
Overview of Study.......................................................................................................10
CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW....................................................................13
Introduction..................................................................................................................13
Motivation....................................................................................................................13
The Socio-Educational Model...............................................................................16
Integrativeness and Integrative Orientation.....................................................18
Instrumentality and Instrumental Orientation..................................................21
Attitudes toward the Learning Situation..........................................................24
Attitudes toward Learning the Language.........................................................27
Language Anxiety............................................................................................30
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Home Background Characteristics..................................................................32
Critique and Conclusion..................................................................................34
Alternate Theories of L2 Learning Motivation......................................................36
Investment........................................................................................................36
L2 Motivational Self System...........................................................................41
Other Theories of L2 Learning Motivation.....................................................46
Theories of Motivation in Educational Psychology...............................................49
Attribution Theory...........................................................................................50
Self-Efficacy Theory........................................................................................52
Other Theories of Motivation from Educational Psychology..........................56
Immersion Education...................................................................................................57
Motivation Research in Immersion Contexts........................................................59
Does motivation relate to achievement in immersion programs?...................60
Are immersion students more motivated than non-immersion students?.......63
What is immersion student motivation like?...................................................65
Does motivation relate to persistence in immersion programs?......................68
Topical Frameworks for this Study........................................................................71
Persistence and Attrition in Immersion Programs...........................................72
Developing Cross-Cultural Understanding in Immersion Students................73
Conclusion...................................................................................................................77
CHAPTER THREE: METHODOLOGY..........................................................................78
The Mixed Methods Approach....................................................................................78
Definitions.............................................................................................................78
Debates...................................................................................................................82
The Mixed Methods Design and Philosophy of this Study...................................86
Schools: The Immersion Contexts...............................................................................90
Participants...................................................................................................................97
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Data Sources................................................................................................................99
Obtaining Access...................................................................................................99
Procedures for Initial Contact of Target Population............................................100
Parent Survey.......................................................................................................103
Student Survey.....................................................................................................104
Procedures for Identifying and Selecting Student Interviewees..........................106
Student Interviews...............................................................................................109
Data Analysis.............................................................................................................112
Phase One: Preliminary Data Analysis during Data Collection..........................112
Phase Two: Initial Data Analysis.........................................................................114
Initial Qualitative Analysis: Transcriptions and Initial Coding.....................114
Initial Quantitative Analysis: Statistical Analyses.........................................118
Phase Three: Second Iteration of Qualitative Theme Analysis...........................122
Phase Four: Exploration of Integrated Findings..................................................124
Phase Five: Mini Case Studies.............................................................................125
CHAPTER FOUR: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: PERSISTENCE AND ATTRITION
IN IMMERSION PROGRAMS......................................................................................127
Introduction................................................................................................................127
Two Case Studies.......................................................................................................129
Case Study 1: Carlos............................................................................................129
Case Study 2: AnneMarie....................................................................................133
Discussion............................................................................................................137
Attitudes toward Learning the Language…in an Immersion Setting........................138
Survey Responses: Unexpected Attitudes, Revealing Trends.............................140
Defining Immersion Language Learning.............................................................143
Patterns of Thinking and Belief about Immersion Language Learning...............149
Conclusion...........................................................................................................151
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Anxiety and its Complexities.....................................................................................153
Survey Responses: The Unpredictability of Immersion Graduate Anxiety.........155
The Realities of Immersion Graduate Anxiety: In the Classroom.......................158
The Realities of Immersion Graduate Anxiety: Beyond the Classroom..............161
Conclusion...........................................................................................................164
Influence of Parental and Peer Relationships............................................................164
Parental Influence as Multidirectional.................................................................166
Survey Responses..........................................................................................166
Interview Responses......................................................................................170
Giving a Voice to Peer Influence.........................................................................175
Conclusion...........................................................................................................181
Attitudes Toward the Learning Situation...................................................................182
Evaluation of Teachers........................................................................................183
Evaluation of School Environment......................................................................188
Conclusion...........................................................................................................200
Conclusion.................................................................................................................201
CHAPTER FIVE: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: DEVELOPING
CROSS-CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING IN IMMERSION STUDENTS................203
Introduction................................................................................................................203
Two Case Studies.......................................................................................................205
Case Study 1: Kaley.............................................................................................206
Case Study 2: Thomas.........................................................................................210
Discussion............................................................................................................215
Students’ Received Messages about Culture(s) ........................................................216
Culture Lessons from School...............................................................................219
Culture Lessons from Travel...............................................................................222
Conclusion...........................................................................................................225
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Integrativeness...........................................................................................................227
Survey Responses: Three Subscales, Three Perspectives....................................229
Integratively Oriented Students, Traditionally
and Not-So-Traditionally Defined.......................................................................232
Students’ Reflections on the Language Community...........................................235
Interest in World Languages................................................................................241
Conclusion...........................................................................................................248
Instrumentality...........................................................................................................250
Survey Responses: Dependable Correlations on a Rougher Scale......................251
Instrumentally Motivated Students, Traditionally Defined.................................253
The Unique Instrumental Motivations of Immersion Graduates.........................257
Conclusion...........................................................................................................262
Conclusion.................................................................................................................265
CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION....................................................................................268
Research Question One: Describing L2 Learning Motivation..................................268
Research Question Two: Issues in Immersion Education.........................................275
Research Question Three: Mixing Methods..............................................................279
Implications and Suggestions for Immersion Administrators and Educators............283
1. District-Level Administrators........................................................................283
2. School Administrators...................................................................................286
3. Teachers.........................................................................................................289
Study Limitations.......................................................................................................292
Implications for Future Research...............................................................................295
BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................298
APPENDICES.................................................................................................................326
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Appendix A: Summary of Responses to
Questions in First Section of Parent Survey..............................................................326
Appendix B: University of Minnesota IRB Approval Form.....................................328
Appendix C: Cover Letter (English)..........................................................................329
Appendix D: Cover Letter (Spanish).........................................................................330
Appendix E: Parent Consent Form............................................................................331
Appendix F: Parent Survey........................................................................................332
Appendix G: Student Survey.....................................................................................337
Appendix H: Student Assent Form............................................................................341
Appendix I: Individual Student Interview Protocol...................................................342
xii
LIST OF TABLES
Table 3.1: Correspondence of Research Questions, Analysis Procedures, and Data
Sources...............................................................................................................................88
Table 3.2: Immersion Continuation Program Characteristics............................................91
Table 3.3: Program Demographics....................................................................................93
Table 3.4: Number of Valid Survey Responses and Response Rates................................98
Table 3.5: Number of Student Interviewees....................................................................109
Table 3.6: Deductive Codes used in Initial Interview Coding, Relation to Survey
Subscales..........................................................................................................................116
Table 4.1: Questions on the Modified AMTB Corresponding with the “Attitudes toward
Learning the Language” Subscales..................................................................................139
Table 4.2: Effect Sizes of and Standard Deviation Differences among Select Student
Attributes on the “Attitudes toward Learning the Language” Subscales........................141
Table 4.3: Questions on the Modified AMTB Corresponding with the “Target Language
Use Anxiety” Subscale....................................................................................................155
Table 4.4: Pearson Correlation Coefficients of Modified AMTB Subscales with the
“Target Language Use Anxiety” Subscale......................................................................156
Table 4.5: Questions on the Modified AMTB for the “Parental Encouragement”
Subscale...........................................................................................................................166
Table 4.6: Cronbach’s Alpha for All Subscales in the Modified AMTB........................167
Table 4.7: Cohen’s Kappa Coefficients between Student and Parent Evaluations of
Proficiency.......................................................................................................................169
Table 5.1: Questions on the Modified AMTB Corresponding with the Three Subscales
Associated with Integrativeness.......................................................................................228
Table 5.2: Effect Sizes of and Standard Deviation Differences among Select Student
Attributes on Three Subscales Associated with Integrativeness......................................230
Table 5.3: Questions on the Modified AMTB Corresponding with the “Instrumental
Orientation” Subscale......................................................................................................252
xiii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 2.1: Path of Analysis for this Study........................................................................14
Figure 2.2: The Socio-Educational Model.........................................................................17
1
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
Background and Rationale
Why Learn a Language in the United States?
All of our efforts in Iraq, military and civilian, are handicapped by Americans’
lack of language and cultural understanding. – from the Iraq Study Group Report
(Baker et al., 2006, p. 60)
International relations in the military, political, economic, and socio-cultural
spheres require Americans to be adept in navigating other languages and cultures. All too
often, we fall short, and the consequences can be significant, as the report cited above
demonstrates. The excuse that the United States is too vast and too English-dominant to
necessitate any knowledge of other languages is slowly but surely becoming obsolete,
due both to shifting domestic demographics and to expanding access beyond our borders
through telecommunications (Tucker & Dubiner, 2008). The need for monolingual
English-speaking Americans to learn other languages is clearly vital on an international
level.
The positive effects of creating a U.S. citizenry proficient in multiple languages
and cultures are not just global but intimately local, of benefit to both the larger society
and the individual. Researchers have shown that those students who study a non-English
language in school can not only be an important resource for the country, but they can
benefit directly and personally from learning a language other than English. The primary
2 organization for foreign1 language teachers in the United States, the American Council on
the Teaching of Foreign Languages, has put forward the argument on their website that
empirical studies from the past 50 years have shown that language learning supports
academic achievement, that it provides cognitive benefits to students, and that it affects
attitudes and beliefs about language learning and about other cultures (ACTFL, n.d.).
Students who study multiple languages, particularly those who develop sufficient
proficiency in at least two languages, have been demonstrated to perform better than
monolingual students on standardized tests regardless of ability level or economic
background (Cloud, Genesee, & Hamayan, 2000; National Standards in Foreign
Language Education Project, 1999). Language learning thus has implications not just for
the skill set that it can provide for American students. If they reach a sufficient level of
bi- or multilingualism, they can also experience significant cognitive benefits that can
impact their success as students as a whole.
Why Immersion Language Programs?
Language immersion programs are a growing alternative to more conventional
“foreign language” programs in K-12 schools today, with over 600 programs of various
1 In this study, I am focused on the teaching and learning of the second language (L2) of either Spanish or French to students whose first language (L1) is the majority language in the United States, English. Often, particularly in American K-12 school settings, “foreign language,” “world language,” or “modern language” are terms more commonly used to refer to the L2 in these circumstances. However, I have chosen primarily to use the term “second language” (L2) or “target language” throughout this study in order to better reflect the terminology used in the research field, particularly the applied linguistics field of study of second language acquisition. My uses of the terms “foreign language” or “world language” are limited to when I must respond to or address the use of the term in another source (i.e., ACTFL, article titles, course names or departments in schools, etc.).
3 types currently in existence in the U.S., compared with fewer than 50 in the 1970s
(Center for Applied Linguistics, 2006, 2007). Immersion programs offer their students
the opportunity to learn a second language through academic content (e.g., social studies,
math), with language not being the topic of study per se. The type of immersion program
explored in this study is called one-way immersion, where instruction in an L2 (in this
case, French or Spanish) is intended for speakers of the majority language (in this case,
English). At the elementary level, one-way immersion features instructional use of the
target language for at least 50% of the day, promotes additive bilingualism and biliteracy,
employs teachers who are fully proficient in the two languages of instruction, relies on
support for the majority language in the community at large, and clearly separates the
teacher use of the L1 and the L2 for sustained periods of time (Fortune & Tedick, 2008).
The end goals of an immersion education include “academic achievement, bi- or
multilingualism, literacy in at least two languages, and enhanced levels of intercultural
sensitivity” (Fortune & Tedick, 2008, p. 10).
Immersion programs have been identified as the most effective language learning
program models in schools (Genesee, 1987; Lyster, 2007). With a unique ability to help
students develop high levels of functional language proficiency, immersion programs still
have the potential to support academic achievement, provide cognitive benefits to
students, and positively influence attitudes and beliefs about language learning and about
other cultures just as the more traditional “foreign language” programs have been shown
to do (Fortune & Tedick, 2008; Genesee, 1987, 2004). Indeed, research even suggests
that language use and positive attitudes about the second language and culture stop
4 developing after students leave immersion programs (MacFarlane & Wesche, 1995).
Thus, immersion education programs offer Americans a prime opportunity to answer the
call to be more adept in navigating other languages and cultures. Immersion programs
represent the vanguard of effective K-12 L2 program models in the U.S., and we must
seek every opportunity to both improve and learn from them in order to better serve the
citizens of our communities and of the world.
Why Language Learning Motivation?
One way of examining immersion education programs is through an investigation
of immersion students’ L2 learning motivation, a construct that has been extensively
developed in L2 educational research. Studies in L2 learning motivation outside of
immersion education have indicated that student motivation is consistently linked to
success and persistence in the classroom (Dörnyei, 2003); some researchers have even
suggested that with a better understanding of the social dynamics of L2 learning
motivation, “it may be possible to strengthen learners’ bilinguality” (Clément, Noels, &
MacIntyre, 2007, p. 52).
Within immersion research, the construct of motivation has not been studied as
systematically. However, an examination of motivation can provide insights into a
number of important issues. First, research about immersion programs in both the
qualitative and quantitative paradigms has suggested that researchers need to look at
more than academics and program limitations to understand the reasons why students
leave programs (Foster, 1998). Attrition from immersion programs has been identified as
a major concern in the field for many years (Fortune & Jorstad, 1996), and long-term
5 experience in immersion programs is vital for establishing sufficient proficiency and the
related benefits listed above (MacFarlane & Wesche, 1995). Secondly, most theoretical
frameworks addressing L2 learning motivation have incorporated issues about culture as
much as language. Because one of the goals of immersion programs has been to enhance
levels of cultural sensitivity in immersion students (Fortune & Tedick, 2008), more
research about L2 learning motivation can help educators to address the development of
cross-cultural understanding in immersion students more effectively in their programs. A
study of immersion students’ L2 learning motivation thus obviously has the potential to
contribute to the body of research about L2 learning motivation as a whole; it also has the
potential to identify ways that immersion programs could better meet their stated goals.
Significance of the Problem
Only a handful of studies in immersion settings have addressed L2 learning
motivation in earnest; few have it as a major focus, and their findings are contradictory.
All too often, motivation seems to be difficult for researchers to capture in immersion
settings, particularly in comparison with competence-related constructs like “willingness
to communicate.” Furthermore, L2 learning motivation has almost always been studied
quantitatively through survey research, via the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB)
developed by Gardner in conjunction with his socio-educational model (Gardner, 1985a,
1985b). Researchers in L2 learning motivation have maintained that the socio-
educational model applies to immersion as well as non-immersion settings (see for
example Gardner, 1985b), yet the few studies using the theoretical framework and the
AMTB in immersion settings have produced varied and inconsistent results (Marangelli,
6 2001; Strong, 1984). Some scholars have called for new methodological and theoretical
approaches to L2 learning motivation in order to address issues like these (Dörnyei,
2003).
Furthermore, most research on immersion students has focused on language
acquisition rather than the psychological or social outcomes of immersion education,
even though, as we have seen, immersion programs claim attitudinal benefits. Those
studies that have addressed student attitudes in immersion programs have focused on
sociopolitical and sociolinguistic contexts outside of the U.S., primarily Canadian French
immersion programs for English-dominant students (see Genesee, 1987; Lambert &
Tucker, 1972). Others have tended to reference student attitudes indirectly in the context
of the attitudes of parents or administrators; the voices and needs of the students
disappeared into adult anecdotes and program evaluations (see Christian, Montone,
Lindholm, & Carranza, 1994; Montone & Loeb, 2000). Although early adolescents
(students ages 10-15) were the subjects in some of these studies, very few of the studies
directly addressed their specific developmental needs as learners.
This study will contribute in important ways to these documented theoretical,
methodological, and topical gaps in research on L2 learning motivation and immersion
education. In my theoretical positioning, I start with the construct of motivation as
defined in the socio-educational model, but I also incorporate other theories on learning
motivation to expand and elucidate that theoretical framework. Methodologically, this
mixed methods study seeks to incorporate qualitative research into the traditionally
quantitative work on L2 learning motivation that has characterized the socio-educational
7 model. Finally, in this study, I give a voice to the early adolescent graduates of one-way
early total immersion programs in the United States, adding a new perspective on
immersion education to the field of research while identifying ways that these programs
can better reach their goals.
Research Questions
In this study, I investigate the L2 learning motivation of elementary immersion
school graduates. In this section, I introduce the research questions that guide this study,
with a brief review of how they are formulated to respond to and examine important
issues in the field.
RQ1: What contributes to the second language (L2) learning motivation of
elementary immersion program graduates? How do these motivating factors
interrelate?
This research question is formulated in order to directly address the construct of
motivation as it has been operationalized in the socio-educational model and researched
using the AMTB. The AMTB comprises several subscales of questions that reflect
certain constructs related to L2 learning motivation in the socio-educational model (for
instance, “Attitudes toward learning the language” or “Target language use anxiety”).
Some studies have examined correlations between different constructs, others have used
structural equation modeling to test specific pathways, and still others have aggregated
scores on the subscales in order to provide assessments of these basic components
(Gardner, 2001a). This research question asks how, in my context and with my
participants, these different subscales might perform.
8
Additionally, this question allows for the use of qualitative methods in order to
expand upon or elaborate on some of the findings from the AMTB. The first part of the
question is specifically not limited to the factors included in the AMTB or the socio-
educational model, as such, other factors might certainly emerge in the course of the
study from the qualitative data. As for the second part of the question, the
“interrelationship” among motivational factors in the quantitative context implies an
analysis of correlations among variables. In the qualitative context, it suggests a
consideration of how participants might link ideas, thoughts, and themes. My use of mini
case studies of individual students will provide further illustration of how the motivating
factors interrelate. RQ1 thus allows for the use of mixed methods research to address L2
learning motivation in both a deductive and an inductive way. It is addressed throughout
the presentation of my findings.
RQ2: What does an examination of the L2 learning motivation of early adolescent
immersion graduates reveal about important issues in immersion education, such as: (a)
Issues about persistence in and attrition from immersion programs? (b) Issues about the
development of cross-cultural understanding in immersion students?
This question is intended to focus the general examination of language learning
motivation more on the specific context of immersion education. This question was
revised during the process of data analysis from an earlier version that focused on the
differences in L2 learning motivation among different groupings of immersion graduates
(for example, continuing versus non-continuing students, or students of French and
students of Spanish). As the analysis progressed, I realized that the questions that I
9 wanted to answer were more pointed and specific to issues that have repeatedly been
raised in the research on immersion education, and that my analysis was more suited to
answer slightly different questions related to those issues. If I were operating in a purely
quantitative paradigm, this revision of the research questions would not be possible.
However, my philosophy of mixed methods research corresponds to the dialectic thesis,
which engages both quantitative and qualitative paradigms simultaneously (Greene,
Caracelli, & Graham, 1989; Rocco et al., 2003; Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003). The role of
inductive reasoning in this study is significant, and as such, I felt that it was
recommended to alter this research question in order to provide a clearer connection
between what I was seeing in the data and what I was asking.
The presentation of my findings has been structured around RQ2. I discuss my
rationale for choosing these particular topical frameworks in Chapter Three. I examine
Part (a) of the question in Chapter Four, and Part (b) of the question in Chapter Five.
RQ3: In what ways do the data collected through student interviews provide
insight into the data generated by the results of the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery?
This question directly addresses the type of mixed methods design of this study.
This study follows an “Explanatory Design,” in which qualitative data builds on
quantitative results. Creswell and Plano Clark (2007) have recommended a question
phrased as “In what ways do the qualitative data help to explain the quantitative results?”
as the template for a research question for this type of design (2007, p. 106). This
research question, like RQ1, is addressed throughout the presentation of my findings.
10
Overview of Study
This chapter has provided the background and rationale for this study, focusing on
language learning in the United States, immersion education, and L2 learning motivation.
I have defined the significance of the problem addressed in this study. I have reviewed
the research questions that guide and reflect this study. In this review, I have offered
some additional background as to how these research questions fit with my philosophy
and design of a mixed methods study.
Chapter Two provides a review of the literature related to this study. I first
examine the considerable theoretical and empirical literature on motivation, beginning
with an overview of the socio-educational model, the primary theoretical framework
guiding this study. I discuss some of the main components, concepts, and critiques of
this model, as well as the findings in L2 research (including immersion research) that
reflect these components. I then summarize and discuss two alternate theories of L2
learning motivation, and two other theories of motivation in educational psychology as a
whole, and research on motivation related to this study that uses these frameworks.
These secondary theoretical frameworks provide a means to expand beyond the
components of the socio-educational model. I end this chapter with a review of
motivation research on immersion education, organized by the common questions asked
in studies related to this topic. Finally, I outline the topical frameworks of this study that
guide the presentation of my findings starting in Chapter Four.
I begin Chapter Three with an overview of the mixed methods approach,
including the definitions and debates about it that currently dominate the field of social
11 science research. I define and explain the mixed methods design and philosophy behind
this study. A description of the schools, participants, and data sources for this study
follows. This chapter concludes with a summary of the five phases of data analysis that
shaped this study.
Chapter Four is a presentation and discussion of the results related to the first
topical framework of this study: persistence and attrition in immersion programs. I begin
this chapter with two mini case studies of students who provide interesting perspectives
on this topical framework. Then, I present quantitative results and qualitative discussion
about four aspects of L2 learning motivation that relate to this topical framework, as
defined either by the socio-educational model and/or as emerged as themes in the
qualitative data. These four aspects include: attitudes about immersion language
learning, anxiety and its complexities, influence of parental and peer relationships, and
attitudes toward the learning situation.
Chapter Five is structured very similarly to Chapter Four, but with a focus on the
second topical framework of this study: the development of cross-cultural understanding
in immersion students. This chapter also begins with two illustrative case studies of
individual students. Then, quantitative results and/or qualitative discussion about the
following three aspects of L2 learning motivation are presented: students’ received
messages about culture(s), instrumentality, and integrativeness.
Chapter Six begins by returning to the research questions with a summary of the
responses that have been provided in my results and discussion. I then address the
practical implications for stakeholders in immersion education, including
12 recommendations for retaining students, setting program goals, and knowing immersion
students. I end the chapter and the study with a brief discussion of study limitations and
implications for future research.
13
CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW
Introduction
Attempting to frame a study that addresses the construct of motivation means
choosing from among a great number of theories and manners of operationalizing a
widely-referenced social psychological learner attribute. In sharp contrast to this,
framing a study in the context of immersion education means drawing from a body of
research that is unevenly developed as a whole, and certainly in relation to social
psychological variables. This study is situated at the crossroads of two frameworks, one
largely theoretical (motivation), and one contextual (immersion education). The overlap
between these two frameworks has shaped the design of this study and analysis of the
data. Figure 2.1 gives an overview of how I have conceptualized the frameworks around
my analysis, starting with my data sources (which are summarized in Chapter Three),
then continuing through several theoretical frameworks of motivation theory, and then
through the filter of immersion education, particularly two topic areas that I have
identified. Ultimately, my findings will reflect all of these areas in the literature.
Motivation
There is an enormous quantity of theoretical and empirical work about motivation
in the field of educational research. Even within the content area of L2 education,
motivation has been approached and addressed from many different perspectives, with a
long history of research extending back to the founding of many of the major journals in
14 Figure 2.1: Path of Analysis for this Study
the field today. In order to focus my review of the literature on motivation, I have
selected my theoretical approach to the construct of motivation with a great deal of care.
Persistence and Attrition
Quantitative Data
Socio-educational Model
Qualitative Data
Investment
Data Sources
Selected Theoretical Frameworks
Topical Frameworks in Immersion Education
Developing Cross-Cultural Understanding
Findings
Self-Efficacy Theory
Attribution Theory
L2 Motivational
Self System
15 I have elected to limit my efforts to theoretical and empirical works about motivation that
are directly relevant to the nature of my study. I begin my review of the literature with a
consideration of the socio-educational model, the dominant model of L2 learning
motivation in the field. I continue with an examination of two other theories of L2
learning motivation that I find to have important potential in exploring beyond the socio-
educational model in the context of my study, the notion of investment and the L2
Motivational Self System. I also briefly report on theories of L2 learning motivation that
I have elected not to use in my analysis, in order to better clarify my perspective as a
researcher. I then step back even further and look at two theories from educational
research as a whole, the attribution theory and self-efficacy theory, which I have found to
be particularly pertinent to the context of the early adolescent learner. I also briefly
address the motivation theories in general education research that I feel are not as
pertinent to my study.
As Figure 2.1 shows, I have a complex vision of the role that these four theories
of investment, the L2 Motivational Self System, self-efficacy theory, and attribution
theory, play in my analysis. I see them as secondary to the socio-educational model,
since that model is the basis for the instruments that I used to collect data. However, in
positioning them as secondary, I allow them to follow up on the socio-educational model,
to facilitate a further examination of the model’s construction of motivation, and even to
incorporate some data, in all likelihood from the qualitative portion of my study, that
does not fit neatly into its theoretical framework.
16
The Socio-Educational Model
To begin, I will address the model for L2 learning motivation that has most
influenced and shaped my approach to the construct of motivation in my study: the socio-
educational model. In 1959, Gardner and Lambert wrote an article published in the
Canadian Journal of Psychology that featured research on Canadian native English
speakers in high school who were studying French. From their analysis of the test
results, the authors concluded that two factors were related to achievement in French:
linguistic aptitude, and a motivation characterized by a willingness to be like valued
members of the language community. Additionally, they found that students with this
second motivational orientation, whom they identified as “integratively oriented,” were
generally more successful and had more favorable attitudes than those who were
“instrumentally oriented,” those with a more utilitarian view of the language (Gardner &
Lambert, 1959).
This early study was the first step in the development of the socio-educational
model, in any estimation, the most influential way of constructing motivation in L2
research. Over the years, the construction of motivation featured in this model of
language acquisition has been the basis of the majority of L2 research on motivation, due
in large part to the overwhelming empirical evidence produced by Gardner and his
colleagues (Gardner, 2001b). Other theories were incorporated into it (see for example
Clément’s model in Clément & Kruidenier, 1985), and it maintained its dominance until
the 1990s (Dörnyei, 2005). At that time, several influential articles were published (see
17 Figure 2.2: The Socio-Educational Model (Gardner, 2005, p. 6)
for example Dörnyei, 1994a; Oxford & Shearin, 1994) that challenged and critiqued the
socio-educational model and its dominance. Since then, contemporary scholars in L2
learning motivation have presented new, comprehensive models and theories in order to
better construct motivation for L2 learning researchers. However, as one of Gardner’s
colleagues stated, “…one of the great challenges will be to tap new motivational
phenomena rather than duplicate already established concepts” (Tremblay, 2001, p. 253).
In part because of the general recognition of the influence of the socio-educational
model in the field of L2 learning motivation research, I have chosen to use it as the
starting point for this study. As we saw in Chapter One, one of the primary purposes of
this study is to look anew at the socio-educational model and the Attitude/Motivation
Test Battery (AMTB), the instrument associated with that model, which is used to assess
the major affective factors in the learning of second language. I begin this process with a
Integrativeness
Motivation
Attitudes toward the Learning Situation
Instrumentality
Ability
Language Achievement
Language Anxiety
18 summary of the main tenets and relationships developed in conjunction with the socio-
educational model (Figure 2.2). The only exception is the “ability” component, as
assessments of ability are not a part of this study, which focuses more purely on the
social psychology of the student and not their academic aptitude. I do address some
important parts of the model that have been included in earlier versions or that do not
appear on this particular visual representation. This summary also reveals another
important reason why the socio-educational model is an excellent theoretical framework
to use as the starting point for this study: many of the major concepts in the model are
very relevant to the purpose, context, and methodology of my study.
Integrativeness and Integrative Orientation
As suggested by the 1959 study, and as shown in Figure 2.2, one concept that is
key to the socio-educational model involves the word “integrative.” In the 1959 text,
Gardner and Lambert focused on “integrative orientation,” which, again, is characterized
as a purpose for learning a language; the aim of language study for someone with an
integrative orientation is to “learn more about the language group, or to meet more and
different people (1959, p. 267). Since that time, Gardner and his associates have refined
and expanded the terminology of the socio-educational model; the word representing this
particular perspective in the model is “integrativeness,” which Gardner described as:
…an individual’s openness to taking on characteristics of another
cultural/linguistic group. Individuals for whom their own ethnolinguistic heritage
is a major part of their sense of identity would be low in integrativeness; those for
19
whom their ethnicity is not a major component, and who are interested in other
cultural communities would be high in integrativeness (Gardner, 2005, p. 7).
Integrativeness is thus a complex of attitudes rather than a simple reason for studying the
language; on the AMTB, it is actually measured by items from three separate subscales:
“Attitudes toward the target community;” “Integrative orientation” (a desire to learn
language because of wanting to communicate with members of the target language
group) and “Interest in foreign languages” (Gardner, 2005). Integrativeness relates not
just to attitudes about the target culture, but to all other cultures and to the individual’s
own ethnic identity. Gardner and his colleagues have argued repeatedly that learners who
show a motivation related to integrativeness tend to experience more positive outcomes
in achievement and other aspects of language learning (Clément, Gardner & Smythe,
1977a, 1977b; Gardner, Day, & MacIntyre, 1992; Gardner & Lambert, 1959).
Results about integrativeness from beyond the work of Gardner and his associates
have been mixed. Some scholars have supported this connection of integrative
motivation2 to achievement. For instance, recent studies by Dörnyei and his colleagues
have posited that integrativeness was the superior predictor of high motivation and
achievement, subsuming all others (Csizér & Dörnyei, 2005; Dörnyei & Clément, 2001).
However, not all findings in research addressing the socio-educational model have
agreed. Most notably, some studies featuring findings in certain contexts, particularly in
2 The terms “integrativeness,” “integrative orientation,” and “integrative motivation” are distinct terms in the literature written by Gardner and his associates. I have used the terms referenced by the researchers whose work I am citing; if that work is completed by someone outside of Gardner and his associates, the distinctions are rarely key to an interpretation of the study. Where necessary in this chapter and in my own analysis, I have used the terms as defined in Gardner 2005.
20 contexts other than foreign language programs in United States or Canada, have
suggested that having an integrative orientation was a minor or insignificant indicator of
attitude and motivation, or that it did not significantly enhance language acquisition.
Studies featuring these findings have investigated, for example, students of English as a
Second Language in Canada (Belmechri & Hummel, 1998; Clément & Kruidenier,
1983), students of Arabic in Israel (Kraemer, 1993), and students of foreign language in
Hungary (Nikolov, 1999). Singh (1987) argued that the implication that positive attitudes
toward the target community (an indicator variable for integrativeness) are linked to
achievement only works in bilingual community contexts, such as the Canadian context
where the original 1959 study took place. In monolingual contexts like much of the
United States, there has not been shown to be a substantial correlation.
A consideration of the literature on immersion education and motivation clearly
shows that the socio-educational model has been influential, particularly in its concept of
integrativeness. This is not to say that it has been seen as the most influential factor; in
fact, the opposite has often been the case. In several studies about attrition out of French
immersion programs in the Canadian context, researchers found that students who chose
to leave the program did not necessarily have negative attitudes about the target culture,
less motivation, or less of an integrative orientation than students who did not leave
(Campbell, 1992; Morton, Lemieux, Diffey, & Awender, 1999). Similarly, another study
in a two-way immersion context in the United States argued that having an integrative
motive had nothing to do with achievement in that setting (Strong, 1984). Additionally,
Carey (1987) pointed out that it has been difficult to trace precisely the path of integrative
21 orientations and achievement in immersion education, since chances are the student
population already had a positive attitude toward the target culture, as evidenced by their
desire (or their family’s desire) to enroll in the program in the beginning (Carey, 1987).
One study in the Canadian context showed that students who participate in an immersion
program only had better opinions about the target culture in comparison to non-
immersion students in the abstract, when actual interaction with the target community
was not possible (Van der Keilen, 1995). Although these studies do not necessarily
support the importance of integrativeness in immersion education, it is clear that the
socio-educational model has played a significant role in how motivation is considered in
immersion contexts. I revisit these studies when considering the context of immersion
education later in this literature review.
Aspects of motivation related to integrativeness are of paramount importance to
my study, not only because of their predominance in the socio-educational model and
related research. Inquiry into a participant’s integrativeness can also reveal a great deal
about his/her desired or actual cross-cultural understanding. Integrativeness is thus an
important part of the analysis featured in Chapter Five addressing the development of
cross-cultural understanding in immersion students.
Instrumentality and Instrumental Orientation
Another important aspect of motivation hypothesized by Gardner as a part of this
model (Figure 2.2) is “instrumentality,” more generally termed “instrumental
orientation,” or “an interest in learning the second language for pragmatic reasons”
(Gardner, 2001b, p. 11). Pragmatic reasons, or goals, could include a desire to satisfy
22 language requirements, or to learn a language for a job. Unlike the factors related to
integrativeness, instrumental factors were originally merely considered as an orientation
in Gardner and Lambert’s (1959) work, and they remained so through the heyday of the
socio-educational model in L2 learning motivation research. Until the more recent
diagram of the socio-educational model pictured in Figure 2.2, instrumentality had not
typically been included because, as Gardner attested, instrumental factors only “might”
contribute to motivation (Gardner, 2001a, p. 7). It was instead categorized as one of the
“other support” factors. Only recently has instrumentality become a part of the visual
representation of the socio-educational model, and, as Figure 2.2 shows, Gardner has still
designated its connection to motivation with a dashed line rather than the solid line that
connects integrativeness and motivation, or attitudes toward the learning situation and
motivation.
Early research by Gardner and his associates supported the contention that
instrumentality was less important to the socio-educational model; one study even
presented an argument that instrumental factors might be demotivating to L2 learners
(Clément et al., 1977b). Moreover, Gardner has argued that the instrumental orientation
is “both conceptually and empirically…quite diverse” and that it is the least internally
consistent of all of the measures (Gardner & MacIntyre, 1993b, p. 188). However,
Gardner has since softened his initial stance about the primacy of integrative over
instrumental factors. In a 1991 article authored with MacIntyre entitled, “An
instrumental motivation in language study: Who says it isn’t effective?” Gardner
explained that, in order to measure instrumental motivation, scholars must “establish a
23 situation in which such motivation will be salient” (Gardner & MacIntyre, 1991, p. 59).
He has also written that integrative and instrumental orientations have a high positive
correlation, indicating that “neither class of reasons is mutually independent” (Gardner,
2001a, p. 15).
Indeed, in recent years, scholars outside of Gardner’s immediate circle of
colleagues have objected to the inferior importance accorded to instrumental orientation
in the socio-educational model, repositioning it in an area of more importance in relation
to integrativeness. Scholars working in contexts beyond North America have shown in
studies that instrumental factors may be more important than Gardner has theorized,
particularly in cases where the foreign language being learned is one of high
socioeconomic value that is readily and repeatedly apparent to the learner, for example,
English in Hong Kong (Carless & Wong, 2000) or Hungary (Dörnyei, 1990).
Research has shown that both integrative and instrumental reasons have been vital
to how L2 students articulate their reasons for taking language classes. A 1986 study by
Ely, designed in part to “explore the integrative/instrumental paradigm” (p. 32), indicated
the existence of two types of motivation clusters that bore a resemblance to integrative
and instrumental factors. Similarly, an ethnographic, longitudinal study about young L2
learners between the ages of 6 and 14 in Hungary demonstrated that, as the children got
older, they spoke more about instrumental factors, albeit in a vague way; integrative
factors were never mentioned (Nikolov, 1999). Note however that these studies did not
take place in immersion contexts; unlike integrative factors, instrumental factors for
24 learning language have not typically been the focus of research about immersion
programs.
As the research above suggests, whether or not the students in this study
demonstrated or discussed instrumental reasons as important in their L2 learning
motivation had important implications for the development of their cross-cultural
understanding. Are students who are more pragmatic about reasons for learning language
less concerned about connecting with the target culture(s)? The concept of
instrumentality is thus very revealing about the development of cross-cultural
understanding in immersion students; this is addressed in Chapter Five.
Attitudes Toward the Learning Situation
All too often, the socio-educational model has been reduced to impoverished
reflections of integrative and instrumental orientations by researchers. For example, in an
article entitled, “Motivational factors and persistence in foreign language study,” Ramage
(1990) called Gardner and Lambert’s work “the integrative-instrumental approach to
measuring motivation” (p. 192). Many studies have used instrumental and integrative
motivation as two subscales among many, measured through survey research in order to
address issues of attitude and motivation; these studies disregarded the fact that these
concepts came from a complex and multi-faceted model, and one that includes attitude
already (see for example Kuhlemeier, Van Den Berg, & Melse, 1996; Sung & Padilla,
1998; Yeon & Baik, 2006). This dichotomizing and essentializing of the central concepts
of the socio-educational model was a misinterpretation of Gardner’s work, as Gardner
himself has argued (Gardner & MacIntyre, 1991; Gardner & Tremblay, 1994a, 1994b).
25 The most serious casualty of this essentialization of the socio-educational model
was the factor of attitudes toward the learning situation, which has been considered to
have at least an equal relationship with motivation as integrativeness (see Figure 2.2), and
certainly has been historically considered to be more influential than instrumentality (R.
C. Gardner, personal communication, March 28, 2008). The class of variables associated
with attitudes toward the learning situation relate to any aspect of the situation in which
the language is learned. Gardner further specified, “In the school context, these attitudes
could be directed toward the teacher, the course in general, one’s classmates, the course
materials, extra-curricular activities associated with the course, etc.” (2001b, p. 8). The
subscales on the AMTB used to measure this attribute have been “Evaluation of the target
language teacher” and “Evaluation of the target language course” (Gardner, 2001b).
If we consider the context and methodology of my study, the role of this
particular attribute has the potential to manifest itself differently from Gardner’s
conceptualization. Most importantly, students in one-way total immersion programs3 like
those examined in this study do not have just one target language teacher and one target
language course. They would have great difficulty identifying exactly one teacher who
was their “target language” teacher, since they would be more likely to associate their
teachers with grade levels, according to the U.S. elementary school model, or perhaps
with subject areas. As they take most or all of their content courses in the target language
3 I will investigate the program model in this study in more detail in Chapter Three. However, a short explanation here for the purposes of clarity in this chapter: one-way total immersion has been traditionally defined as a program serving majority language students (in the United States, English-language speakers) that offers 100% L2 subject matter instruction in the early grades, introducing L1 subject matter instruction between second and fifth grades and increasing its amount every year (Genesee, 2008).
26 from an early age, questions about a target language course would be very difficult to
answer (Fortune & Tedick, 2008).
However, these students’ attitudes about the learning situation could clearly
extend not just to the classroom but to the school in general, as it is all part of the
language-learning enterprise. Genesee (1987), an important theorist and researcher in
immersion education, has agreed, suggesting that researchers investigate the school
setting in more detail, in order to better understand the “students’ perceptions and
interpretations of the sociolinguistic norms of the school” (1987, p. 114). He continued in
saying that issues of L2 learning motivation are not just directed to communities of
practice; the school setting itself is also important to consider. As an example of how this
might look in an immersion setting, a recent study by Bearse and de Jong (2008) in a
two-way immersion (TWI)4 context was successful in examining students’ attitudes about
the immersion program, finding that their general attitudes toward the learning situation
were positive.
Since the questions on the original AMTB (Gardner, 1985a) were more focused
on classroom-based attitudes toward the learning situation, they had to be removed from
my modified version. They did not make sense in the immersion context and could not
be changed in a way that mirrored the original intent of the questions. This decision is
4 Two-way immersion (TWI) programs differ from one-way programs primarily in that they are ideally half members of the majority language group (again, English in the United States) and half of the minority language group (in the United States, most commonly Spanish). In the early grades, instruction is 50% to 90% in the minority language. If the early grades have more minority than majority language instruction, then instruction in the majority language is increased gradually until the instructional languages are roughly equally balanced by later grades (Genesee, 2008).
27 discussed in greater detail in Chapters Three and Four. However, as the work by
Genesee (1987) and Bearse and de Jong (2008) have indicated, this part of the socio-
educational model is still relevant to my study. The inclusion of qualitative data has
allowed this motivational factor to become a part of my analysis despite the difficulty in
including it in the modified AMTB. Specifically, the students did reflect on their
teachers, although they did not identify them as target language teachers. They also
discussed the school environment as a whole, particularly with regard to the transition
between elementary and middle/junior high school. Those two parts of their attitudes
toward the learning situation enter significantly into my analysis. These reflections had
important relevance to whether or not they chose to persist in the immersion continuation
program; as such, this motivational factor is discussed in Chapter Four.
Attitudes Toward Learning the Language
Although the factor of students’ attitudes toward the learning situation is well-
established in the socio-educational model, in other publications, Gardner has seemed to
equate “attitude” with other, slightly different definitions, including students’ attitudes
toward learning the language (Gardner, 1988). Researchers using the socio-educational
model and variations of the AMTB have similarly interpreted the word “attitude” in a
number of ways (see Smith & Massey, 1987; Worth, 2008). Not surprisingly, early
critiques of the socio-educational model argued that its concept of “attitude” was weak
and ill-defined (Chihara & Oller, 1978). Even beyond research based on the socio-
educational model, other L2 researchers have been similarly unspecific about the
definition of attitude and its relationship with motivation in their research (see for
28 example Morgan, 1993). Muchnick and Wolfe (1982) found that different types of
attitude may be unrelated and have unequal influences on motivation, suggesting that all
attitudes are not created equal. Clearly, the issue of “attitude” in the socio-educational
model is somewhat problematic, and it is one of the parts of the model that has been
disregarded by other researchers in creating new models of L2 learning motivation.
However, one subscale of the AMTB, “Attitudes toward learning the language,”
has been included in the AMTB adaptation used in this study. This variable is not
pictured in Figure 2.2 because Gardner (2005) has positioned it as a minor indicator
variable that contributes to “Motivation” in the socio-educational model, similar to how
interest in world languages has been positioned as an indicator variable for
integrativeness. Gardner has explained the relationship between students’ attitudes
toward learning the language and their motivation by saying that “the motivated
individual will enjoy the task of learning the language. Such an individual will say that it
is fun, a challenge, and enjoyable, even though at times enthusiasm may be less than at
other times” (Gardner, 2001b, p. 10, emphasis his). This definition characterizes
attitudes toward learning the language as a more or less fixed factor that may only vary in
the intensity of the enthusiasm associated with it.
It is important to consider the students’ attitudes toward learning the language in
this study for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike the factors in the socio-educational
model like evaluation of teacher or course evaluation, this factor can be addressed with
very little adaptation in the immersion context. Immersion graduates are able to respond
to statements like, “Learning [target language] is really great,” even though the way that
29 they have learned language differs considerably from the more traditional L2 learning
environment targeted by the original versions of the AMTB. Secondly, of the three
indicator variables for motivation in the model (“Attitudes toward learning the language,”
“Motivational intensity,” and “Desire to learn the language”), students’ attitudes toward
learning the language were the easiest to include conceptually and logistically in my
adaptation of the AMTB. I found that the questions included in the original AMTB in the
subscales of “Desire to learn the language” and “Motivational intensity” were very
similar to questions in the “Attitudes toward learning the language” subscale, and since
they were formatted differently as multiple-choice questions, they presented issues with
extensively lengthening the survey. Furthermore, as Gardner himself has stated,
measuring motivational intensity with a self-report scale is inherently problematic
(Gardner, 1985b; see also Crookes & Schmidt, 1991). In the case of early adolescents
who might feel more pressure to be positive in their responses, the intensity of their
motivation might be seriously misrepresented in the survey results.
Finally, I believe that examining students’ attitudes toward learning the language
in a study conducted in an immersion environment is an interesting question to pursue in
a mixed methods study. Because of the very different pedagogical philosophies
underpinning immersion education, early adolescent immersion learners learn the target
language very differently from how students in traditional “foreign language” classes do.
Finding out not just how immersion language learners feel about learning a language, but
what they think learning a language entails, can be very revealing about the actual
experience of immersion education. This, in turn, can shed light on other important
30 questions in immersion education research, particularly questions relating to language
acquisition. The role of students’ attitudes toward learning the language is addressed in
my discussion of persistence and attrition in immersion education in Chapter Four.
Language Anxiety
Language anxiety has been defined in the socio-educational model as “the
apprehension experienced when a situation requires the use of a second language with
which the individual is not fully proficient” (Gardner & MacIntyre, 1993a, p. 5). As
Figure 2.2 shows, this most recent version of the socio-educational model does not depict
a direct relationship between language anxiety and motivation. In the 1985 version of the
AMTB, language anxiety was addressed with the subscale “Language class anxiety”
(Gardner, 1985a), but more recently, Gardner and his colleagues have divided it between
subscales assessing “Language class anxiety” and “Language use anxiety” (Gardner,
2001b; Gardner, 2005). In making this designation, Gardner and his colleagues have
differentiated between two contexts: the language classroom, and the situations outside of
the classroom where the language might be used (Gardner, 2005).
As the visual representation in Figure 2.2 reflects, findings from related research
have most frequently found that language learning anxiety has had an inverse relationship
with achievement (Gardner et al., 1992; Gardner & MacIntyre, 1993b). However,
reflecting earlier representations of the socio-educational model, language anxiety was
shown in other research to have a negative correlation with the variable of motivation
(see for example Gardner & MacIntyre, 1993a, p. 8; Gardner, Masgoret, & Tremblay,
1999, p. 432). Unlike the literature on integrative and instrumental factors, the literature
31 on language learning anxiety extends well beyond studies that reference the socio-
educational model. Some studies have featured examinations of anxiety measured and
evaluated separately from the results of the AMTB (Brown, Robson, & Rosenkjar, 2001),
or as a part of a set of learner attributes that approximated but did not strictly draw upon
those in the socio-educational model (Schmidt & Watanabe, 2001; Wesche, Morrison,
Ready, & Frawley, 1990). Findings from these studies have varied, but the study by
Wesche et al. (1990) is notable in that it took place in an immersion context, comparing
early and late French immersion students in Canada. The researchers found that the
students generally had low language anxiety, whether they had attended early or late
immersion programs. Other studies in immersion settings have addressed language
anxiety, but using frameworks other than the socio-educational model (see for instance
MacIntyre, Baker, Clément, & Donovan, 2003b; Marangelli, 2001).
The applicability of “Language class anxiety” and “Language use anxiety” in the
context of this study is somewhat problematic. As with attitudes toward the learning
situation, the difficulty of getting immersion students to reflect on language class anxiety
lies in the fact that the students do not have just one language class. Language use
anxiety operates under the assumption that the students have access to a context outside
of the classroom where the language may be used. In the Canadian context of
Anglophone students of French where the socio-educational model was created, this was
certainly possible. However, in the context of this study, the assumption that the
immersion students can easily access opportunities to speak the target language outside of
the classroom is flawed.
32
However, unlike the case of the subscale “Attitudes toward the learning
situation,” I was able to adapt the questions about language anxiety in the version of the
AMTB used in this study. I discuss this process in Chapter Three. The role of language
anxiety in the immersion graduates’ decisions to persist in immersion education is
discussed in Chapter Four.
Home Background Characteristics
The concept of students’ home background characteristics has also been
associated with the construct of motivation in the socio-educational model. Although this
concept was not included in the 2005 visual representation of the model in Figure 2.2 or
in more recent explanations of the socio-educational model (see for example Gardner,
2001b), it did enter into earlier versions of the socio-educational model as well as the
AMTB. For Gardner and his colleagues, home background characteristics have been
comprised of a consideration of parental attitude, parental encouragement, and/or
percentage of French population in the home environment (such as the students’ local
community) in a measurement of student motivation (Gardner, 1985a; Gardner et al.,
1999; Lambert & Tucker, 1972). In these works, scholars investigated the nature of
parental encouragement and its relation to achievement, placing it in a bidirectional
relationship with attitude toward the learning situation and motivational intensity in a
visual representation of the socio-educational model. Perhaps the most important finding
related to this has been that the percentage of French population in the home environment
was negatively correlated with French use anxiety (Gardner et al., 1999, p. 432). The
authors concluded that what they termed “early contextual factors” like home background
33 characteristics were influential on current attitudes, motivation, and perceived second
language proficiency. This finding was supported by research conducted by scholars
outside of Gardner’s circle, as well (see for example Kondo-Brown, 2001; Kraemer,
1993; Sung & Padilla, 1998).
Even though this particular attribute has been excised from more recent
representations of the socio-educational model, I have included it in this study because of
its particular relevance to the context of my study. Research supporting the importance
of home background characteristics in motivation-related issues in one-way immersion
education is extremely common (see for example Bruck, 1978, 1985; Campbell, 1992;
Dagenais & Day, 1998, 1999; Foster, 1998; Hayden, 1988). Furthermore, the influence
of home background characteristics on early adolescents in other educational contexts has
also been shown to be very important (see for example Inbar, Donitsa-Schmidt, &
Shohamy, 2001; Wentzel, 1998). The students in my study are at an age and an
educational level where their identities are in transition, with an increasing focus on peer
interactions and a relationship with their parents and their home-centered identities that is
more likely to be changing (Bandura, 1997; Jackson & Davis, 2000).
As such, it is important to consider and reconsider home background
characteristics as an aspect of the socio-educational model in this study, even though that
part of the model is somewhat less defined in the theoretical framework. Parental
influence is discussed in detail in Chapter Four, particularly as to how it relates to
persistence and attrition in immersion programs.
34 Critique and Conclusion
The socio-educational model has been praised as one of the first models of
motivation that took into account the idea of the cultural and social setting where learning
takes place (see, for example, MacIntyre, MacKinnon, & Clément, 2009; Moyer, 2004).
Significantly, Gardner and his colleagues based their early work primarily in a context
where two influential world languages are spoken, the country of Canada, which is
officially bilingual (French and English). Yet, as Dörnyei has argued, this sometimes
heated socio-political context may have led the socio-educational model to become
disproportionately dependent on “the macro perspective” of learning communities and
intercultural communication and affiliation (Dörnyei, 2001a, 2003).
Dörnyei maintained that, in response to the “macro perspective” of the socio-
educational model, more research needed to be done on “a situated approach
characterized by a micro perspective” (Dörnyei, 2003, p. 12, emphasis his); Bernard
Spolsky (1989) has called this the “the social milieu of learning.” For Dörnyei, this
meant that the classroom perspective also needed to be considered in order to create an
accurate model of L2 learning motivation, characterized by individual learners’
willingness to communicate, task motivation, and learning strategy use. This has already
been seen in Genesee’s comments on the socio-educational model in Learning through
two languages (1987). Another early and influential critique of the socio-educational
model, written by Crookes and Schmidt (1991), similarly suggested that one of the main
limitations to the study of L2 language learning motivation was the lack of attention to
classroom learning. Mannavarayan (2002) stated that the socio-educational model,
35 because it assumes student ability, is not very helpful in considering immersion students
with learning disabilities. This assessment, like that of Genesee, indicated that some
immersion researchers would like to see models that reflect more of the differences
between students, rather than a large, multivariate model that generalizes about the
population.
Another very important critique of the socio-educational model is its dependence
on what Crookes and Schmidt (1991) termed Gardner’s “causality hypothesis,” which
suggested that positive attitudes and strong integrative orientations lead to achievement in
the language (p. 474, see also Skekan, 1989). Crookes and Schmidt put forth the idea
that achievement might, in fact, be the cause of positive attitudes and/or strong
integrative orientations; there is no way to know for sure. Indeed, some of the earliest
critiques of the socio-educational model challenged the connection between its construct
of motivation and achievement (Chihara & Oller, 1978; Oller & Perkins, 1978).
Correlation is not causation, and as Spolsky (2000) has pointed out, all that any
researcher on motivation, a latent construct, can do is to trace “high probabilities
for…patterns to be closely related” (2000, p. 162). The fact that nearly all of the research
conducted to verify and support the socio-educational model has been conducted in a
positivistic paradigm based on the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery for data collection
belies the fact that it is a model created to show causality.
Ultimately, the socio-educational model has provided the field, and this study,
with a solid theoretical framework that contains a number of provocative ideas about L2
learning motivation. Although many scholars in L2 research have modified this model
36 since its prominence in the 1990s, far too many of the concepts in the model relate
directly to the context of this study for it to be disregarded in my analysis. However, this
mixed methods study seeks to incorporate qualitative research into the traditionally
quantitative work on L2 learning motivation that has characterized the socio-educational
model. As such, a consideration of other theories of motivation can enrich and open
other paths to analysis as well.
Alternate Theories of L2 Learning Motivation
L2 scholars, particularly since the mid-1990s, have pulled from some of the
general educational theories of motivation, as well as the fields of sociology, psychology,
and applied linguistics, both to respond to and to expand on the socio-educational model.
Some theoretical frameworks have leaned heavily on the terms and concepts of the socio-
educational model, while others did not even use it as a point of departure. In this section,
I focus primarily on two theories on L2 learning motivation that relate directly to the
context and methodology of my study: investment, and the L2 Motivational Self System.
I also briefly review some other theories in the field of L2 learning motivation studies,
and offer my rationales as to why they are not particularly useful to my study.
Investment
The notion of investment developed by Norton first became a part of the
mainstream discourse about L2 motivation in 1995, when her extremely influential article
“Social identity, investment, and language learning” was published in TESOL Quarterly.
In defining “investment” in this work and others, she explicitly began with the concepts
developed by Gardner and his associates, then explained why she took it in a different
37 direction. Instead of adopting Gardner’s concepts of instrumental and integrative
motivation, she explained that she was seeking a more “complex relationship between
power, identity and language learning” in her work (Norton, 2000a, p. 10). In doing so,
she called upon the work by the French sociologist Bourdieu (1984), who most famously
linked social class with the economic concepts of “capital.” As such, Norton defined
“investment” thusly:
The concept of investment…signals the socially and historically constructed
relationship of learners to the target language, and their often ambivalent desire to
learn and practice it. It is best understood with reference to the economic
metaphors that Bourdieu uses in his work – in particular the notion of cultural
capital [which references] the knowledge and modes of thought that characterize
different classes and groups in relation to specific sets of social forms…If learners
invest in a second language, they do so with the understanding that they will
acquire a wider range of symbolic and material resources, which will in turn
increase the value of their cultural capital (Norton, 2000a, p. 10).
This definition reflects a nuanced understanding of L2 learning and the potential
influences on students who are specifically studying language. In some ways, although
Norton avoided saying so, we can interpret investment to be a concept closely related to
motivation, since it addresses the internal processes that give behavior its energy and
direction (Reeve, 1996). Additionally, it inherently reflects a strong awareness of the
importance of context in L2 learning motivation studies. What is the first language of the
students studying? What is the target language? What is the community of membership
38 of the learner, and what is the target community? These are concerns that are central to
the concept of investment, but which appear only as part of the socio-educational model.
Even though the concepts of integrative and instrumental motivation are related to
investment, it is clear that investment is much more rooted in the social history of the
learner and their multiple desires, rather than what Norton called a “unitary, fixed, and
ahistorical” language learner suggested by the socio-educational model (Norton, 2000a,
p. 10).
Reaction to the concept of investment in the community of scholars researching
L2 learning motivation has been positive. Ushioda and Dörnyei (2009) cited Norton as a
leader in what they called the “poststructuralist perspective on identity,” which allows for
an idea of motivation and identity as being socially constructed, often in inequitable
relations of power (2009, pp. 4-5). Unsurprisingly, other researchers have adopted the
concept of investment to address L2 learning situations that fall outside the boundaries of
the student experience in traditional L2 classroom models in the United States and
Canada (where the learners share a common majority-language L1 and are learning a
minority-language L2 in a language class). Norton’s own work has been situated in
Canada, but she has looked at immigrant learners of the majority language of English
(Norton Peirce, 1995; Norton, 2000a, 2000b). In a qualitative study, McKay and Wong
(1996) supported the idea that investment is a viable lens through which to view the
experiences of adolescent Chinese-immigrant students and their English-language
development. Similarly, Weger-Guntharp (2006) examined the case of self-defined
heritage learners of Chinese at a US university. She found that what she calls the
39 “paradigm of investment” fit her findings about social identity being a site of struggle in
the decisions that the learners make “when their primary and secondary reasons for
learning Chinese interact, and potentially conflict, with other student needs” (2006, p.
39). This second study was essentially a qualitative study, although it did feature some
descriptive statistics based on survey information as well as interview data. One can see
from these examples that the notion of investment has commonly been used to investigate
L2 learning motivation in circumstances where issues of identity and L2 learning are
complex and multi-faceted. Importantly, all of these studies were based in the qualitative
analysis of data sources like interviews and long written responses; this approach, of
course, suggests a vital relevance to my mixed methods study.
Several studies in immersion contexts have made use of Norton’s notion of
investment in order to make sense of data. Dagenais (2003) applied the concept of
investment in an ethnographic study of immigrant parents’ rationale for choosing French
immersion education and pursuing multilingualism. As such, Dagenais cited Bourdieu’s
(1984) idea of language as capital, wherein parents “invest in their children’s acquisition
of more linguistic capital, imagining that it will enable them to secure a place in a
competitive world” (Dagenais, 2003, p. 277). Immigrant parents of immersion students,
she argued, invested in multiple languages, education, a transnational identity, and
imagined communities for economic, symbolic, and social reasons. Potowski (2004)
used the concept of investment in a slightly different way in a TWI context in the United
States as she addressed the competing identity investments experienced by individual
students in the classroom. She found that some students calculated if they were getting a
40 “return on their investment” with their teachers and fellow students in their decisions to
use Spanish (2004, p. 95).
Yet another perspective on investment in an immersion context can be seen in
Bearse and de Jong’s 2008 qualitative study about secondary students’ participation in a
two-way immersion (TWI) program in the United States. Consulting with both Anglo
(L1=English) and Latino (L1=Spanish) students, Bearse and de Jong found that the two
groups had different motivation for learning Spanish, and hence a different investment in
the TWI program. The Anglo students were more invested in obtaining the linguistic
capital of Spanish, while the Latino students were invested in the symbolic value of
Spanish, closely connected with their own identities. This particular study sheds even
more light on the differences between the concepts of the socio-educational model and
investment. Where the Anglo students clearly showed instrumental reasons for learning a
language, there is really no part of the model that would account for the Latino students
and their desire to invest in their own symbolic identities through their experiences in
immersion education.
It is clear that the concept of investment as developed by Norton has a great deal
to offer my study, in terms of the study’s context of immersion programs, and its
methodology moving beyond the traditional quantitative studies of L2 learning
motivation. However, it is clear that there is a need for more research about the role of
investment specifically among students in a one-way immersion environment in the
United States. The presence of the studies on immersion summarized above can give us
hope that the notion of investment would be relevant to the context of this study, but
41 more investigation is certainly needed.
The L2 Motivational Self System
Another important theory about L2 learning motivation, spearheaded by Dörnyei,
shares some concepts with both the socio-educational model and the notion of
investment. Called the “L2 Motivational Self System,” this extended theory has emerged
in the past few years in Dörnyei’s work, largely out of his dissatisfaction with what he
terms the “enigma” of integrativeness in the socio-educational model. It has also come to
fruition because of Dörnyei’s desire to approach motivation in a way that takes into
account the fact that learning a language reflects more than just the mastery of a content
area, but that it potentially has repercussions in identity formation (Dörnyei, 2005).
Although some of Dörnyei’s earlier work focused on the idea of a process-oriented
conceptualization of motivation (see Dörnyei, 2003, 2005; Weger-Guntharp, 2006),
because the purpose of my study was not to examine temporal variation in motivation,
the L2 Motivational Self System is more relevant to my work. Furthermore, I feel that
the L2 Motivational Self System shares some important features with both the socio-
educational model and Norton’s concept of investment, yet also allows for other factors
to enter into the discourse about L2 motivation.
The L2 Motivational Self System was founded around the idea of “possible
selves” that “give form, meaning, structure, and direction to one’s hopes and threats,
thereby inciting and directing possible behavior” (Dörnyei, 2005, p. 100). The concept
of possible selves was taken from self-discrepancy theory (Higgins, 1987, as cited in
Dörnyei, 2009; MacIntyre et al., 2009a), which posited that “future, as-yet-unrealized
42 selves have the potential to be powerful motivational influences on behavior” (MacIntyre
et al., 2009a, p. 47). Yashima (2009) characterized the relationship between individuals’
current selves and their possible selves as a “bridge of self representations,” where the
student might, for example, envision being a teacher of the target language rather than a
native speaker, as that requires less of a leap of imagination (2009, p. 152). As such,
possible selves are a function of who students are in the present moment, as well as who
they would like to be in the future (Dörnyei, 2009).
Working from the general concept of possible selves, Dörnyei then formulated the
L2 Motivational Self System from the results of a multivariate statistical analysis of
Hungarian school children’s generalized motivational dispositions, stemming from a
modified AMTB. Dörnyei and his colleagues published portions of this study in several
different venues by (Csizér & Dörnyei, 2005; Dörnyei & Clément, 2001; Dörnyei &
Csizér, 2002). In this framework, Dörnyei has specified that the possible selves in the L2
Motivational Self System are comprised of an ideal L2 self and an ought-to L2 self. The
ideal L2 self exists when the person we would like to become speaks an L2. It is closely
related to the concept of integrativeness in the socio-educational model, in that a learner
who sees an ideal self speaking the L2 is assumed to want to be like members of the
target L2 culture (Dörnyei, 2005; MacIntyre, MacKinnon, & Clément, 2009b; Ryan,
2009). The ought-to self refers to “the attributes that one believes one ought to
possess…in order to avoid possible negative outcomes” (Dörnyei, 2005, p. 106). As
such, the ought-to L2 self corresponds more with instrumentality. Finally, the L2
Motivational Self System combines these two dimensions with a third, namely the L2
43 learning experience, which is concerned with situation-specific motives related to the
immediate learning environment (Dörnyei, 2005). In this tripartite construction, note the
L2 Motivational Self System further echoes the socio-educational model.
As a new theory in the field, relatively less research has been generated based on
the L2 Motivational Self System compared to the socio-educational model and the notion
of investment, beyond the purely quantitative work already conducted by Dörnyei and his
colleagues that led to and support this model (Dörnyei & Clément, 2001; Dörnyei &
Csizér, 2002; Csizér & Dörnyei, 2005). Other research has focused on verifying or
examining the relationship between concepts in the L2 Motivational Self System and the
socio-educational model, including the connection between the concept of the ideal L2
self and integrativeness (Ryan, 2009). Some studies have examined the relationship
between both the ideal and ought-to L2 selves and the socio-educational model’s concept
of instrumentality; these studies have found that instrumentality could be either a part of
the ideal L2 self or the ought-to L2 self, depending on how much the student had
internalized the external reasons for learning the language. (Kim, 2009; Taguchi, Magi, &
Papi, 2009). Csizér and Kormos (2009), in a study of language learners in Hungary,
found that the ought-to L2 self of secondary and university learners of English was less
influential than the ideal L2 self and the learning environment in determining motivated
learning behavior. Furthermore, the authors found that students’ possible selves might
change with age, as the younger students in their study were more focused on their
learning environments than the university students.
The context of these studies has largely been in English as a Foreign Language
44 (EFL) settings abroad, in countries as diverse as Japan (Ryan, 2009; Yashima, 2009),
Indonesia (Lamb, 2009), and Hungary (Csizér & Kormos, 2009), as well as several
studies in settings involving multiple nations and/or languages (Taguchi et al., 2009;
Ryan, 2009). One study involved Korean-dominant ESL learners in Canada (Kim, 2009).
Taguchi et al. (2009), in their study comparing Japanese, Chinese, and Iranian EFL
students with students in Dörnyei’s setting of Hungary, argued that context did not
significantly affect the “validity” of the L2 Motivational Self System (2009, p. 110).
Beyond a brief mention in the conclusion to one study about English immersion students
in Japan (Yashima, Zenuk-Nishide, & Shimizu, 2004), the L2 Motivational Self System
has not been a part of the body of research on immersion education. The authors of that
study, who had focused to that point in their analysis on the socio-educational model and
the students’ willingness to communicate, had referenced the framework as a potential
lens for further inquiry.
Although the relevance of the L2 Motivational Self System to the immersion
context is unclear according to the literature in the field at present, I argue that it has a
great deal of potential to illuminate and expand on the construct of motivation in the
socio-educational model in the context of my study. First of all, unlike the socio-
educational model, the L2 Motivational Self System, particularly the concept of the ideal
L2 self, is explicitly grounded in the social environment of family, peer, and teacher
influence (Dörnyei, 2009). It is thus congruent with what Ushioda (2009) referred to as a
“person-in-context” relational view of motivation. She defined this as:
A focus on the interaction between [a] self-reflective intentional agent, and the
45
fluid and complex system of social relations, activities, experiences and multiple
micro- and macro-contexts in which the person is embedded, moves, and is
inherently part of. My argument is that we need to take a relational (rather than
linear) view of these multiple contextual elements, and view motivation as an
organic process that emerges through the complex system of interrelations
(Ushioda, 2009, p. 22).
This concept of motivation is particularly relevant to work with early adolescents, as
many researchers have suggested that early adolescents’ social and academic domains are
not necessarily distinct (see for instance Jackson & Davis, 2000; Wentzel & Wigfield,
1998). As other L2 learning motivation researchers have recognized, this aspect of the
L2 Motivational Self System also “expands the focus on language” in the socio-
educational model to other motives that learners might have (MacIntyre et al., 2009a).
Secondly, the L2 Motivational Self System allows for contradiction, interplay,
and most importantly, varied motivational profiles within one student, as Csizér and
Dörnyei demonstrated in a 2005 study. This study provided evidence that a learner’s
motivational profile differed depending on the target language that they were being asked
to consider. Dörnyei also proposed that the idea of possible selves goes beyond “logical,
intellectual arguments” to “images and senses, approximating what people actually
experience when they are engaged in motivated or goal-directed behavior” (2009, p. 15).
Both of these characteristics in the L2 Motivational Self System shed some important
light not only on the immersion context, but also on the motivation of early adolescents.
Finally, I would agree with Ushioda (2009), in that the L2 Motivational Self System can
46 work extremely well within the ontology associated with qualitative research, where
social reality is constructed by the individuals experiencing it (Cohen, Manion, &
Morrison, 2000). The concept of participants as “real persons” rather than “theoretical
abstractions” can clearly be best addressed through a more qualitative paradigm
(Ushioda, 2009, p. 220). Lamb (2009), the author of the Indonesian study cited above,
suggested that using interviews to elicit comments about ideal and ought-to L2 selves
could provide more “scope for identification processes to emerge” than having
respondents fill out surveys (2009, p. 245). Although the foundational work for this
framework was of a quantitative nature, these arguments support the contention that more
qualitative work is needed and appropriate in L2 learning motivation research based in
the L2 Motivational Self System.
Other Theories of L2 Learning Motivation
This is by no means a comprehensive list of theories or research about L2 learning
motivation that goes beyond the socio-educational model. I have chosen not to include
these other theories in my literature review or consideration of my own analysis for the
same reasons I have mentioned before: they do not seem to reflect the context or the
methodology of my study. However, it would be beneficial to briefly review these
theories, since they do appear directly and indirectly in the literature about L2 learning
motivation. My discussion of these theories will also help readers of this study to
understand my perspective about theoretical frameworks with a little more precision.
Perhaps the two most well-known and influential of these theories were
developed by researchers who have worked in Gardner’s circle: MacIntyre and Noels.
47 MacIntyre’s model, which incorporated the notion of “willingness to communicate”
(WTC) and individual variation in the construct of motivation developed in the socio-
educational model, is notable in that it considers the individual as much as or more than
the collective (MacIntyre, Baker, Clément, & Donovan, 2003a; MacIntyre, Clément,
Dörnyei, & Noels, 1998). A few quantitative, survey-based studies in immersion
contexts have been conducted with this model in mind; researchers have found that
immersion students have less anxiety and more WTC than non-immersion students, but
that their levels of motivation vary independently of competence-related constructs like
WTC (Baker & MacIntyre, 2003; MacIntyre, Baker, Clément, & Donovan, 2003a,
2003b). I made a similar finding about willingness to communicate in a multiple case
study that served as a pilot for this study (Wesely, 2009).
Noels’ model and research about L2 learning motivation has been an overt
attempt to address the “conceptual impasse” in L2 learning motivation research regarding
the importance of integrative versus instrumental motives in learning language (Noels,
2001b). Her work has been based on the interaction between aspects of the socio-
educational model and the central concepts of self-determination theory (SDT), intrinsic
and extrinsic motivation (Deci, Vallerand, Pelletier, & Ryan, 1991; Deci & Ryan, 2002;
Noels, 2001a, 2001b; Noels, Clément, & Pelletier, 1999, 2001; Noels, Pelletier, &
Vallerand, 2000). I examine SDT, which focuses on the relationship between extrinsic
motivation (teacher control, rewards, etc.) and intrinsic motivation (learner energy), in
more detail in the next part of this literature review. For instance, Noels has argued that
learners who score significantly on the “external regulation” subcomponent of extrinsic
48 motivation on questionnaires, defined as “those activities that are determined by sources
external to the person, such as tangible benefits or costs,” also scored significantly as
being instrumentally oriented (Noels et al., 2000, pp. 61-62). More recently, Noels
(2009) has discussed how SDT should be reconsidered in the field as issues of autonomy
and context in language learning have gained currency.
My omission of these two theoretical frameworks from my analysis stems from
two things: the type of data that I collect in this study, and the role that I see secondary
L2 motivation theories taking in my study. Most practically, without collecting any data
about instruction, classroom environment, or communication procedures, these
theoretical frameworks would be hard to address. Furthermore, like studies based on the
socio-educational model, both of these frameworks have been supported by quantitative
analyses of large-scale survey data, where the surveys have been comprised of questions
that reflect the operationalization of motivation that is particular to the frameworks. The
direction of their reasoning has been deductive, not inductive. For the purposes of my
study, I am best served by secondary frameworks that have the potential to treat data
inductively rather than deductively, and investment and the L2 Motivational Self System
have this potential far more than the frameworks conceptualized by MacIntyre and Noels.
Ultimately, I feel justified in excluding these models from my analysis because I would
rather keep a more holistic idea of the language learner in mind rather than focus on
competence-related constructs (like WTC) or the causal relationships that depend on
classroom instruction or interaction.
49
This review of the literature does not fully exhaust all of the writings on
motivation that can inform this study. One important set of theories about motivation
that can be very relevant to a study on L2 learning motivation comes from the field of
educational psychology. That is the area that I explore in the next section.
Theories of Motivation in Educational Psychology
[In the 1990s,] researchers in effect wanted to close the gap between motivational
theories in educational psychology and in the L2 field, claiming that by focusing
so much on the social dimension, other important aspects of motivation have been
overlooked or played down (Dörnyei, 2001a, p. 17).
As I have already discussed, many of the critiques of the socio-educational model
began to gain currency in the mid-1990s. These pleas for an expansion of the socio-
educational model were interwoven with entreaties to open up the research agenda or
theoretical paradigm for the field of L2 motivation research as a whole, as the quote
above attests (Dörnyei, 1994a; Oxford & Shearin, 1994). As such, incorporating theories
from other parts of educational research can greatly enhance the theoretical background
for this study.
As with my consideration of other theoretical frameworks about motivation, I
have chiefly limited my consideration to the theories and frameworks that can somehow
inform the context and methodology of my study. The context of my study with early
adolescents in immersion programs limits my review, as does the fact that I am not
including measures of these students’ academic success. Moreover, I will be looking at
motivation theories that have some sort of applicability in mixed methods or qualitative
50 studies, moving beyond the purely quantitative paradigm that depends on deductive
reasoning. I conclude this section with a discussion of some influential theories that I
have decided not to incorporate into my analysis, with my rationale as to why those
theories are not particularly relevant to my study at present.
Attribution Theory
One of the leading ideas in the field of social psychology and motivation in the
1980s, attribution theory, posits that past successes and failures (and the perceived causes
of those successes and failures) affect students’ perceptions of their own capabilities,
which then influence their motivation (Covington, 1984; Dörnyei, 2003; Williams,
Burden, & Al-Baharna, 2001). According to attribution theory, successful students
“attribute their successes to a combination of skill and effort,” whereas failing students
“attribute their successes…to external factors such as luck, task ease, or the generosity of
a teacher” (Covington, 1984, p. 93). Successful students thus believe that their failure
stems from “a lack of proper effort,” and failing students attribute failure to “lack of skill
or ability” (Covington, 1984, p. 93). Studies have shown that successful students are thus
more likely to seek out challenges and put energy into their work; unsuccessful students
avoid challenges and anticipate constant disappointment in class (Nicholls, 1984).
Motivation is thus lower in unsuccessful students, and higher in students with more
success in class. More recent studies based on the attribution theory have suggested that
reactions from peers and teachers might have more of an influence on students and their
motivation than actual achievement, so much that they “override the significance of the
achievement itself” (Hareli & Weiner, 2002, p. 183).
51 But why include attribution theory in my review of literature, and exclude other
theories? Attribution theory has a particular relevance to my study for a few important
reasons. First of all, attribution theory is particularly relevant to studies about early
adolescents. We know that these students are commonly just as subject to social
pressures as they are motivated to succeed academically. Attribution theory is based on
emotions as well as expectations, and it allows for the fact that students may make sense
of perceived successes and failures in different ways (Hareli & Weiner, 2002; Peterson &
Schreiber, 2006, Weiner, 1984; Williams & Burden, 1999; Williams et al., 2001). As
Eccles and Wigfield (2002) argued, “Attribution theorists emphasize that individuals’
interpretations of their achievement outcomes, rather than motivational dispositions or
actual outcomes, determine subsequent achievement strivings” (2002, p. 117). With
attribution theory, students are seen as individual actors who make judgments about their
own success and failure based on a number of factors, many of which may not always be
predictable. It is also important to note in the above quote the phrase “rather
than…actual outcomes;” the actual measurement of achievement is not necessarily
important to the study of motivation using attribution theory.
Additionally, and perhaps not surprisingly, attribution theory has more connection
with the qualitative tradition of research. Studies outside of L2 learning motivation have
supported the connection of attribution theory to a more qualitative methodological
undertaking, suggesting diary studies, vignettes, and narrative analysis as promising
sources of data (Hareli & Weiner, 2002). It certainly stands to reason that the emotions
investigated in studies supporting attribution theory, like pride, shame, sympathy, pity,
52 guilt, and anger, would be well-suited to a qualitative approach (Peterson & Schreiber,
2006). Ushioda has often connected her findings about motivation as a qualitative
variable to the attribution theory, contrasting the “observable and measurable activity”
which defines motivation in quantitative research with the “patterns of thinking and
belief” underlying such activity that is investigated in qualitative work (Ushioda, 2001, p.
96; see also Ushioda, 1994). She has emphasized the fact that such research framed
around the attribution theory questions the notion that “success/failure and motivation are
bound together in a one-to-one cause-and-effect relationship” (Ushioda, 2001, p. 121).
Instead, this research allowed that learners, when unsuccessful with learning, were able to
“take control of their affective learning experience” by attributing setbacks to
shortcomings that can be overcome (Ushioda, 2001, pp. 120-121).
Because of its relevance to the context and methodology of my study, I will be
using attribution theory as one of the secondary theoretical frameworks for my
exploration of the L2 learning motivation of the early adolescent immersion graduates.
Attribution theory is rarely used in studies relating to L2 learning motivation, but its
perspective from outside of the field will help to meet the goals set forth by the critiques
of the socio-educational model. Another such theoretical framework from educational
psychology can also do this: self-efficacy theory.
Self-Efficacy Theory
Self-efficacy theory, like attribution theory, is based in part on learners’
judgments of personal capability and the degree of controllability that they have
internally (Bandura, 1997). Defined as “people’s judgments of their capabilities to
53 organize and execute courses of action required to attain designated types of
performances” (Schunk, 1991, p. 207), self-efficacy rejects what Bandura has called the
“crude” idea that everything in motivation is externally controlled (1997, p. 23). When a
student has self-efficacy, s/he feels able to succeed in an academic environment, and self-
efficacy theory holds that “the best predictors of behavior in specific situations are
individuals’ self-perceptions within those situations” (Schunk, 1991, p. 212). Self-
efficacy theory differs from, and, arguably, expands upon attribution theory in that it does
not focus on actual successes or failures; it reflects a variety of elements that relate to
how learners see themselves. Indeed, attributions are just one of many types of cues that
students use to appraise their own efficacy. Like attribution theory, self-efficacy theory
acknowledges the influence of outcome expectations and values, but it also incorporates
and emphasizes the importance of students’ beliefs concerning their capabilities (Schunk,
1991). Not surprisingly, self-efficacy is also seen to have predictive utility when it comes
to motivation and achievement; students with high self-efficacy often also have high
levels of motivation and achievement as well.
Bandura, the scholar who formulated and promulgated self-efficacy as an
influential theory in the field, stated in his book Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control
(1997), that the developmental stage of early adolescence was a moment of important
challenges and changes in self-efficacy. Young people before adolescence center their
initial efficacy experiences in their families, where their family helps them to define how
they view themselves and their own abilities. However, when these young people reach
the age of early adolescence, they experience a shift. Research in self-efficacy as well as
54 early adolescent development and education has supported the contention that the peers
of early adolescents and their social environment become much more influential in how
they view their own capabilities (Bandura, 1997; Jackson & Davis, 2000). Furthermore,
Bandura identified a “major environmental change that taxes personal efficacy” during
the transition to middle level schools, where “adolescents move from a personalized
school environment of familiar peers to an impersonal, departmentalized one with
curricular tracking” (1997, p. 179). Other researchers addressing motivational issues
have similarly identified this moment as a time when students change in how they
consider both the importance of their school subjects and their appreciation of the
subjects (for a summary of a few such studies, see Wigfield & Eccles, 2000).
Clearly, this aspect of the theory has direct connections to the context of this
study, namely, the transition from elementary to middle school for immersion students.
A similar transition was featured in a recent study addressing self-efficacy and early
adolescents, where the researchers asked middle and high school students to complete a
questionnaire assessing, among other things, peer classroom climate, social goals, and
self-efficacy (Nelson & DeBacker, 2008). Consistent with previous work, the study
found that adolescents who perceived that they were valued and respected members of
the classroom community reported higher levels of self-efficacy. Furthermore, when the
researchers looked at the transition between middle and high school, they found that there
was a marked downward shift in the students’ expressed self-efficacy and motivation.
The researchers explicitly identified this transition from the middle school environment
(a team model) to the high school environment (a traditional model) as an important shift
55 in how students experienced “belongingness” in the school. As they noted, this finding
paralleled Bandura’s statements and other research about the shift from elementary to
middle school (Nelson & DeBacker, 2008).
Thus, self-efficacy theory has a great deal of potential as a way to examine L2
learning motivation in the context of my study. Unfortunately, I have only been able to
find one study that has been published about self-efficacy in the particular environment
of L2 learning (Ehrman, 1996), an exploratory, survey-based quantitative study that
focuses on adult learners. The authors concluded that self-efficacy is important to
achievement, but they primarily argued for further study on the basis of their findings. It
seems that most of the recent investigations of self-efficacy have been concentrated in
math and science education (see for example Ryan, Ryan, Arbuthnot, & Samuels, 2007)
or technology use in the classroom. Additionally, self-efficacy research has shared the
quantitative focus of research based on the socio-educational model; Bandura’s concerns
about studying self-efficacy have been focused on the development of self-efficacy scales
in their precision and comprehensiveness (1997). Nevertheless, Schunk’s 1991 text on
self-efficacy suggested that work framed around the theory had to move from the more
quantitative studies to more qualitative work. Wentzel and Wigfield (1998) argued that
more qualitative research was necessary to explore how the interplay of students’
motivation in different social settings and contexts would shed light on constructs like
self-efficacy. As such, the concept of self-efficacy connects less with my study in its
methodology than it does in its relevance to my context. Clearly, self-efficacy theory
56 from educational psychology is another “secondary” theoretical framework that may shed
light on the phenomenon of motivation in this study in particular.
Other Theories of Motivation from Educational Psychology
There exist many, many more theories about motivation in educational
psychology. Theories like self-determination theory (already mentioned in the first
section with regard to Noels’ work), goal-orientation and goal-setting theories, and
expectancy-value theory, all provide fascinating windows into the nature of learning
motivation, and none should be discounted as important additions to the field of
motivation research. Their exclusion from this review of the literature is solely a
function of their relative lack of relevance to the context and methodology of my study.
These theories are by and large based in cognitive processes, and the role of affect is
unclear in most or all of them. For instance, in theories about goals and goal-setting like
expectancy-value theory, the cognitive path from causal antecedents to causal ascriptions,
to causal dimensions, to expectancy of success, and to action are seen as automatically
determined, regardless of the individual student (Oxford & Shearin, 1996; Weiner, 1984).
Deci and Ryan (2002), two of the foremost scholars of self-determination theory, referred
to this as a failure to “acknowledge any human nature of deep design to human psyche
other than plasticity and docility” (2002, p. 434). In my opinion, neither attribution
theory nor self-efficacy theory suffer from these same assumptions.
Moreover, many of the alternate theories about learning motivation, as I have
already mentioned, are very focused on outcomes, in terms of achievement outcomes, the
accomplishment of specific goals or tasks, or some other kind of results that can be
57 observed or measured in the classroom (see Oxford & Shearin, 1996; Ryan & Deci, 2000,
2002). As I am not collecting any data in classrooms, asking about academic results or
outcomes, or consulting teachers whatsoever, it is not likely that my study would reflect
many aspects of these theories, and certainly not in a way that I could examine
systematically or consistently. Both attribution theory and self-efficacy theory have often
been used to connect students to outcomes, but only in that they connect between student
and behavior, leaving the relationship between behavior and outcome as something that is
mediated by a different conditional relationship. These, therefore, are much more
appropriate for my study.
Ultimately, I begin with the socio-educational model and explore the early
adolescents’ L2 learning motivation with that model in mind, but I also allow other
theories, structures, and considerations of motivation to enter my analysis as appropriate,
based on the context and methodology of my study. I have summarized several of the
pertinent theoretical frameworks above that might allow more light to enter the picture.
In the next section, I will be looking at how research on immersion education can inform
my study, and how my study can contribute to that research.
Immersion Education
Many of the modern research findings in immersion education, particularly those
from the United States, have focused on issues related to language proficiency and
academic achievement more than the social psychology of immersion students. This has
been true for most of the history of research on immersion. In 1987, addressing the
Canadian context that had been the site of most immersion research to that point, Tardif
58 and Weber suggested that “the bulk of the research on French immersion has focused on
program effectiveness and student outcomes” (1987, p. 70). Twenty years later, in a
2007 research report by Genesee listing the top ten most consistent findings from
research on foreign language immersion, nine of the ten findings reflected findings about
language proficiency and academic achievement; only one touched on the “understanding
and tolerance of the other culture” (2007, p. 110). One can also remark here that
“understanding and tolerance of the other culture” is only one aspect of the social
psychology of a language learner; other factors certainly are influential on how they
experience language learning in the immersion setting. Clearly, there is a long history of
lack of attention to the social psychology of the language learner in the area of immersion
research.
It is time to reconsider the importance of the social psychology of immersion
students for a number of reasons. Both qualitative and quantitative research about
immersion programs has suggested that researchers need to look at more than academics
and program limitations to understand important issues like persistence and attrition in
immersion programs (Foster, 1998). As Genesee’s article (2007) indicated, immersion
programs have the goals of not only bi- or multilingualism, but also cross-cultural
understanding and appreciation and affirmation of diversity, indicating that more research
about students’ attitudes towards other cultures and languages may help educators to
create more effective immersion programs. Finally, only a handful of studies in
immersion settings have addressed the social psychology of language learners in a
59 comprehensive way; more commonly, researchers have selected one aspect of students’
attitudes and investigate that in detail.
In this section, I review the research that does exist on the social psychological
factor of L2 learning motivation in immersion education. From this, I explain how I have
chosen two particular topical frameworks for my own study such that my work will most
benefit the field of immersion research.
Motivation Research in Immersion Contexts
Only a handful of studies in immersion settings have addressed L2 learning
motivation in earnest; few have it as a major focus, and their findings are contradictory.
All too often, motivation seems to be difficult for researchers to capture in immersion
settings, particularly in comparison with competence-related constructs like WTC. For
example, one of the most common ways in the 1980s and 1990s that immersion programs
were researched was through program evaluations, most of which used a variety of
methods (interviews, questionnaires, field notes, documents) to collect data. As
mentioned in the rationale for this study in Chapter One, student perspective as a whole
was often completely left out of these types of studies; the voices and expressed needs of
the students disappeared into adult anecdotes or were reduced to linguistic outcomes (see
for example Christian et al., 1994; Duff, 1991; Lapkin, Swain, Kamin, & Hanna, 1983;
Rhodes, 1989; Rhodes, Crandall, & Christian, 1987). Needless to say, student motivation
was a rare topic in these studies.
Nonetheless, a small number of studies have incorporated both questions about L2
learning motivation and theoretical frameworks common in motivation research to the
60 immersion context. Although not all of these studies approached L2 learning motivation
as their primary focus, I have determined that they all did address it sufficiently to answer
one of four major questions, ordered from least to most relevant to my study:
• Does motivation relate to achievement in immersion programs?
• Are immersion students more motivated than non-immersion students?
• What is immersion student motivation like?
• Does motivation relate to persistence in immersion programs?
I have written these questions as broadly as possible with regard to terms like
“motivation” and “immersion programs,” since I have had include many definitions of
both of these terms in order to group the studies in a meaningful way. In the next section,
I will delineate more clearly how scholars in the field have defined these terms, and what
they have found in response to these questions.
Does Motivation Relate to Achievement in Immersion Programs?
Mirroring the most common relationship addressed in motivation research, the
relationship between student motivation and achievement (Murphy & Alexander, 2000),
there exist some studies about L2 learning motivation in immersion education which
focus on how L2 learning motivation relates to achievement. Viewed as a whole, the
studies linking motivation and achievement in immersion education offer a slight support
for a relationship between student motivation and achievement in immersion education.
Furthermore, they can actually be characterized by a fair amount of diversity,
considering the usual dominance of Canadian studies about Anglophone students of
French that feature in the field of L2 motivation studies in immersion. Perhaps one
61 reason for that diversity is that studies in the Canadian context have been particularly
inconclusive: one such study, a thesis using the socio-educational model by Marangelli
(2001), found very little correlation between achievement and motivation among sixth
grade immersion students, instead finding that anxiety was more connected to
achievement in a negative correlation. MacIntyre and his colleagues (MacIntyre et al.,
2003a), focusing on the connection between motivation and willingness to communicate
(WTC), similarly found that motivation in middle school French immersion students did
not change when other competence-related constructs did; these findings contrast with
those of another study by the same researchers who were able to connect social support
of immersion students with higher levels of willingness to communicate on their part
(MacIntyre, Baker, Clément, & Conrod, 2001).
Studies in other contexts have shed a different light on the connection between
motivation and achievement in immersion students. Two early quantitative studies in
two-way (Spanish and English) immersion programs in the United States suggested that
the link between motivation and achievement in this immersion context could be
mediated by age (Lindholm & Aclan, 1993) as well as L1 background (Strong, 1984).
Lindholm and Aclan, using a little-referenced model of motivation called Harter’s
motivation scale (Harter, 1981, as cited in Lindholm & Aclan, 1993), found that
motivation was more related to achievement in fifth grade students in two-way
immersion than in third grade students. Strong (1984), referencing the concept of
integrative motivation but not the entire socio-educational model, found that having an
integrative orientation did not enhance language acquisition in the context of Spanish
62 students and the “English world.” Despite the unclear theoretical frameworks and the
two-way context, these two quantitative studies uphold the notion that the link between
motivation and achievement in immersion education is conditional at best.
Finally, two recent studies offer yet another perspective on immersion education
and the link between achievement and motivation. These two studies differ from the
previous studies mentioned in that they both studied students in English immersion
schools in countries that rarely appear in the immersion research literature, and in that
they referenced theoretical frameworks more connected to issues of identity. I have
already briefly discussed the first such study, by Yashima et al. (2004), which examined a
rare English immersion school in Japan. Although this study focused primarily on the
construct of students’ willingness to communicate, using Yashima’s concept of
“international posture” and Dörnyei’s L2 Motivational Self System, the authors
connected students’ L2 learning motivation to the presence of a strong international ideal
self, to the student’s willingness to communicate. Similarly, Spezzini’s 2004 study about
an English immersion school in Paraguay was framed in the concept of investment, and
the author argued that students who were more invested, as signaled by using the L2 as
their social language, did better in school.
We can clearly see that studies that were grounded in the socio-educational model
and similar theoretical frameworks have not necessarily been as successful in proving a
link between L2 learning motivation and achievement as have been studies that looked
more at issues of identity among immersion learners. However, although these findings
are helpful in understanding some of the benefits of allowing other theoretical
63 frameworks to enter the picture of immersion research and motivation, these findings are
not necessarily completely relevant to the purposes of this study. To delve more into
more relevant literature, we move on to the next question.
Are Immersion Students More Motivated than Non-Immersion Students?
Another common approach to looking at motivation-related concepts in
immersion has been to compare two groups, often a “treatment” of immersion students
versus a “control” of non-immersion students. Researchers looking at this question
uniformly have agreed that immersion students are more proficient in the target language
based on many measures, including willingness to communicate (MacIntyre et al.,
2003b). However, their findings have been more complex when it has come to
motivational factors, particularly factors related to attitudes about the target culture(s).
The majority of the studies on this topic have been conducted in Canada, with
Anglophone students of French at the elementary or middle school levels, more often
with a heavy dependence on the socio-educational model (Baker & MacIntyre, 2003;
Lambert & Tucker, 1972; Van der Keilen, 1995). Despite these methodological
similarities, these three studies did not hang together or replicate findings whatsoever.
For example, Lambert & Tucker (1972) concentrated more on developmental differences
over time, while Baker and MacIntyre (2003) parsed the results out by gender as well as
by immersion/non-immersion status. Perhaps the most adamant response was from Van
der Kielen (1995), who stated that, “Overall, [immersion] students have a more positive
attitude towards various aspects of the French language and its acquisition as well as
towards French people and their culture” (1995, p. 296). Nonetheless, she admitted that
64 the self-selected nature of the French immersion community suggests that this
relationship might not be causal. The relationship between English and French
Canadians, the nature of the students’ exposure to the target community, and other factors
complicated her analysis further. This type of caveat seemed to trip up all of the
researchers (see Carey 1987 for further analysis), and none were willing to make a
definitive statement comparing the L2 learning motivation of immersion and non-
immersion learners in the Canadian context.
Therefore, viewing these three studies as a whole leaves us with some ambiguity
about the role of the socio-educational model in differentiating between groups of
immersion and non-immersion students in their L2 learning motivation. Researchers
using other frameworks, like MacIntyre et al. (2003b), found that Canadian French
immersion students were not more motivated than non-immersion students. Similarly,
but in a very different context, Lindholm-Leary and Borsato (2002) found that, in a US
TWI context, when the TWI language learners were compared to a small “control” group
of Spanish L1 speakers in non-immersion contexts, there were no statistically significant
differences in motivation.5 Considering these last two studies with the other Canadian
studies, one can see that there is not a clear answer about motivation and differences
between immersion and non-immersion students. I posit that it is simply too difficult to
compare these two populations without a random assignment of groups at the point when
the students initially enroll in immersion education.
5 The nature of the survey measuring motivation was not explained.
65
Although my study does not adopt a comparative perspective, this part of the
literature on immersion and motivation offers some important reminders. As we have
seen in the discussion about theoretical frameworks, the issue of students’ attitudes about
the target culture(s) has been key to many L2 learning motivation theories. Students’
attitudes about the target culture(s) has clearly presented itself again and again in
comparative studies on immersion education, yet the findings were not necessarily
trustworthy, given the self-selected nature of the immersion student group. My study,
which features a qualitative counterpart to the quantitative results related to the socio-
educational model, explores what immersion students get from immersion education with
regard to cultural attitudes, and what comes from other (i.e. familial, travel) sources. As
such, my study can hopefully help to elucidate some of the issues raised in this literature.
What is Immersion Student Motivation Like?
Some studies in L2 immersion settings, particularly in more recent years, have
focused on how students feel, or what they have experienced in immersion education.
Most of these studies have taken an interpretive perspective on the process, hoping to
explore and find out what is already out there; their findings have often been as revealing
about cognitive-linguistic processes as they have been about social-psychological ones.
Motivation and attitude are part of a larger whole; the scholars have not aimed to make
any hard and fast conclusions about the role of motivation in L2 language learning, nor
have they necessarily adhered to a specific theoretical framework of motivation. This of
course differs from the more positivistic work that characterizes the responses to the two
previous questions. Perhaps the most influential study of this type has been de Courcy’s
66 Learners’ experiences of immersion education: Case studies of French and Chinese
(2002). This study has revealed a great deal about the social and emotional experiences
of language learners that has been relatively unexplored in the literature: Australian
immersion schools. Although her ethnographic phenomenological approach did not seek
to find definitive conclusions that can apply to immersion learners as a whole, de Courcy
made some excellent points about the internal conversations that take place with
immersion learners, as well as the importance of social groups to success in immersion
education.
Many studies that have examined immersion students’ experiences and how they
related to L2 learning motivation have asked older immersion students to reflect on their
early experiences as immersion language learners. This collection of studies is
characterized by a diversity of settings. A study about K-6 Swedish immersion students
in Finland (Södergård, 2006) uncovered that students did not talk about a lot of anxiety in
looking back, and that their experiences were generally positive. Some students
mentioned feeling special or proud of the fact that they could speak the language. In a
few studies situated in the Canadian context, the immersion outcomes were varied, but
they were certainly positive. In the case of the MacFarlane and Wesche study (1995), the
students thought they had good attitudes about learning language, but they did not
necessarily say that it was because of their immersion experiences. Foster (1998) closed
her study about “successful” bilingual students in Canada with a list of descriptives,
concluding that the students had “intellectual, academic, personal, and social benefits,
fueled by feelings of confidence and success evolving out of their individual and shared
67 experiences” (1998, p. 113). Other studies have supported these points, including an
autobiographical reflection written by a one-way Spanish immersion student in the
United States (Heideman, 2004) and a comparison of early and late immersion students in
Canada which showed ultimately that they were similarly motivated after their immersion
experiences (Wesche et al., 1990).
It is clear that this type of interpretive research about student experience is very
helpful in explorations of L2 learning motivation in immersion students of a variety of
backgrounds. In recent years, some notable scholars have examined the experiences of
specific sub-groups of immersion learners, and their work has addressed the construct of
motivation. One such study is Haj-Broussard’s 2002 case study about the African-
American French immersion student in the United States. She found that the social
support in the French immersion class helped African-American girls in particular to
excel. Perhaps the most well-known scholar in this area is Dagenais, who has examined
the experiences of multilingual students in Canadian immersion programs. Her early
work was largely ethnographic and sought to explore multilingual students’ experiences
in the classroom (Dagenais & Day, 1998) and at home (Dagenais & Day, 1999). She has
identified a complex world of experiences for these students and their families, where
they were constantly aware of and processing everything from the choice of language on
a day-by-day basis to the more national and international implications of the languages
that they speak. In more recent years, and perhaps not surprisingly, Dagenais has
addressed the notion of investment in the students, connecting their experiences with
their motivation (or their familial motivation) to be a part of a larger community of
68 language speakers (Dagenais, 2003; Dagenais & Berron, 2001). These studies have
shown that exploring the experiences of immersion students can help with understanding
not only the global experience of participating in an immersion program, but also what it
might be like to be a part of a subgroup of such learners.
I was able to identify one study that addressed this question but did not fit with
many other studies described here: the multiple case study about immersion graduates
that I conducted as a pilot for this study. I found that six immersion students, when asked
about their L2 learning motivation, often articulated both integrative and instrumental
motives for learning language, while also attesting that relationships with teachers and
peers were also influential (Wesely, 2009). This research left a great deal of room for
future study.
The ways that the literature has approached this question has given evidence that
there is room for qualitative work in immersion education and L2 learning motivation.
The body of literature has still been dominated by studies in the Canadian context,
however, and the few studies about American one-way immersion students (Haj-
Broussard, 2002; Heideman, 2004; Wesely, 2009) differ greatly in scope and focus from
this study. There is room for more work in this area, and I hope that my study helps U.S.
immersion educators to better understand their students’ experiences in a way that has not
been done before.
Does Motivation Relate to Persistence in Immersion Programs?
As already discussed, research about immersion programs in both quantitative and
qualitative paradigms has suggested that researchers need to look at more than academics
69 and program limitations to understand attrition (Foster, 1998). Within the literature about
student attrition and retention in immersion education, several studies have referenced
social psychological variables like motivation and attitude. Most of the studies about
attrition and retention in immersion education have adopted a more positivistic stance,
seeking causes for the effects of leaving the program. Some excellent studies addressing
the issue of attrition have simply not referenced motivation at all. Of these, most did not
consult students, instead depending on administrator, teacher, or parent perspectives to
identify social psychological factors for staying or leaving the program (see for example
Halsall, 1994; Montone & Loeb, 2000). Other scholars have focused on the issue of
struggling learners in immersion education and the mechanisms involved with their
continued persistence in, or attrition from, the program (see for example Arnett &
Fortune, 2004; Bruck, 1978). Some studies addressed social psychological variables
from the student perspective, but they focused on variables unrelated to motivation like
dislike of the instructors or boredom as a reason for transfer (Lewis & Shapson, 1989), or
issues related to self-confidence or behavior in the classroom (Cadez, 2006). These
studies have shown that analyses of attrition and persistence, though they do sometimes
address social psychological factors for leaving, do not necessarily do so while utilizing a
theoretical framework that relates to L2 learning motivation.
Those studies that have addressed student motivation in relation to persistence
and attrition from an immersion program have produced contradictory findings when data
from the students were analyzed. Several such contradictory studies were conducted in
what I would characterize as a first wave of research on this topic in the 1980s and early
70 1990s, when theoretical frameworks and methodologies did not yet bridge the gap
between what already existed in L2 research and the particular structures and unique
aspects of immersion education. In a comparative study attempting to trace the
differences between poor-achieving Canadian students who transferred out of a French
immersion track and those similarly poor-achieving students who stayed, Bruck (1985)
found through a multivariate analysis that “attitudinal-affective variables are primary
predictors of transfer out of second-language programs” (1985, p. 39). She primarily
used the notion of “self-concept” as a guiding principle, one that has been related to
motivation in the general education literature but which was only somewhat developed in
her study. However, two other studies, one quantitative (Campbell, 1992), and one
qualitative (Hayden, 1988), have directly disputed Bruck’s (1985) findings,
demonstrating that students who left the immersion program by and large left for reasons
unrelated to how they felt about learning language or learning in a French immersion
program. Clearly, some ambiguity exists here.
More recent studies also situated in the context of Canadian one-way French
immersion programs have supported the idea that persistence is not linked to attitude or
L2 learning motivation as it is currently defined in the field. A study using the socio-
educational model and the AMTB (Morton et al., 1999) offered the finding that the non-
continuing students were more negative only in their attitude toward learning French, and
that they were actually less negative in their attitude to the European French and had
more of an integrative orientation. Mannavarayan (2002), based on a review of the
71 literature and anecdotal evidence, supported the contention that motivation does not make
a difference in persistence, or if it does, we cannot trace its precise path.
This question is clearly one that is very important to immersion educators,
administrators, parents, and students. The variety of responses to this question certainly
indicates that more investigation is recommended, particularly research that can examine
the social psychological differences between continuing and non-continuing students in
more detail. I discuss this particular question more as, in the next section, I address the
immersion topics that this study approaches.
Topical Frameworks for this Study
Immersion education and motivation have been linked in the literature in several
ways, although the number of studies that exist is still very small. There has been a clear
concentration of studies on motivation and immersion in the Canadian context, and very
few studies in the U.S. context of one-way immersion programs. Methodological
diversity has been more prevalent in these studies, although there have been very few
systematic mixed methods studies beyond select case studies looking at individual
students or programs.
As such, I can identify a clear need for a study conducted in the United States,
looking at one-way immersion programs, consulting with students instead of parents or
administrators, and focusing on L2 learning motivation. As the above literature has
demonstrated, however, there are many ways to ask questions about motivation in the
immersion context. Through familiarizing myself with the literature and in particularly
the major concerns in the field of immersion education research, two topics in particular
72 seem very appropriate to focus on in this study. In this section, I summarize and provide
the rationales for what I will call my “topical frameworks” for my study, which also
directly address the two parts of my second research question for this study. These two
frameworks are: persistence and attrition in immersion programs; and developing cross-
cultural understanding in immersion students.
Persistence and Attrition in Immersion Programs
The choice to look at persistence and attrition in immersion education, given the
nature of my study, is justified by a number of factors. First of all, it is clear from the
literature that there still remains a great deal of ambiguity in the field about the reasons
why students leave immersion programs. The studies summarized above give more than
sufficient evidence for this, and they do not even address the context that this study
intends to explore, one-way immersion programs in the United States. Secondly,
persistence in an L2 program has long been assumed to have a relationship with student
motivation (see for example Bartley, 1970; Clément, Smythe & Gardner, 1978; Mantle-
Bromley, 1995; Ramage, 1990); exploring this in the context of immersion education will
shed more light on the nature of student persistence in L2 study.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, this topic is of particular interest to a
number of stakeholders in immersion education, including not only administrators,
teachers, parents, and students in current immersion programs, but also the same
stakeholders in districts that are considering the establishment of immersion programs.
The majority of immersion programs in the United States begin at the elementary level
(Center for Applied Linguistics, 2006). However, the shift between elementary and
73 middle/junior high school is often identified as a time of high attrition, with students
choosing to leave the immersion program for a monolingual English curriculum (García,
Lorenz, & Robison, 1995). Research suggests that language use and positive attitudes
about the second language and culture stop developing after students leave immersion
programs. Thus, in leaving, these students do not enjoy the many benefits of
continuation, including increased language proficiency and corresponding cognitive and
personal benefits (MacFarlane & Wesche, 1995). Therefore, understanding more about
the attrition that occurs between elementary and middle/junior high schools in language
immersion programs is critical to the creation of programs that provide the maximum
benefits to students, schools, and the community.
Developing Cross-Cultural Understanding in Immersion Students
This second topic area is less overtly suggested by the literature review above
than is the topic of persistence and attrition in immersion programs. However, I feel that
it merits more examination in my study for a number of reasons. One of the earliest
comprehensive studies about immersion education, the St. Lambert experiment, took
place in the Canadian context of Quebec, where English-speaking and French-speaking
communities lived in what Lambert and Gardner (1972) called a “bicultural and bilingual
society.” The authors explained that the immersion program was designed to promote
bilingualism and biculturalism in the students, with the hope that those students would
some day further the cause of “democratic coexistence that requires people of different
cultures and languages to develop mutual understanding and respect” (1972, p. 3). This
early identification of the goal of “biculturalism” for immersion students in Canada was
74 modified and expanded in later publications by leaders in the field of immersion research.
For instance, in 1984, Genesee formalized Lambert and Gardner’s findings by stating that
the fourth of four goals of immersion education was: “Positive attitudes toward the
students’ home language and culture as well as toward the target language and culture”
(p. 52). Clearly, positive attitudes about the target culture(s), or as Lambert (1984) called
them “sociocultural attitudes” (p. 15), were one of the main desired and expected
outcomes of immersion education, in the first decades of the formalized establishment of
the program model in Canada (see also Swain, 1984).
Research and theoretical works about immersion education in the United States
have refined the wording of this goal further. Early research in one-way Spanish
immersion schools in southern California identified the same four goals for immersion
education as Lambert and Gardner (1972) and Genesee (1984), including the goal of
“developing positive attitudes toward representatives of the Spanish-speaking community
while maintaining a positive self-image as representatives of the English-speaking
community” (Campbell, 1972, cited in Campbell, 1984). Given the high population of
L1 Spanish speakers in southern California and the strength and influence of the Spanish-
speaking community there, one can surmise that, although not identical, this setting is as
close to the Quebec setting as one might get in the United States. Unsurprisingly, when
researchers have focused on more general U.S. settings where representatives of the
target language-speaking community might be harder to find, the goal has been stated
slightly differently or refined in recent years. For instance, Met and Lorenz (1997) stated
that one of the four principal goals of immersion programs in the United States has been
75 that “students learn about and understand the culture(s) of the people who speak the
immersion language” (p. 259). Fortune and Tedick (2008), focusing on a general
definition of immersion applicable in all national contexts, phrased the corresponding end
goal of immersion education as a desire for “enhanced levels of intercultural sensitivity”
(2008, p. 10). I have adopted my wording for how this goal is addressed in my study
(“developing cross-cultural understanding in immersion students”) from a combination of
these phrases and the ACTFL National Standards (1999). Although the “culture”
inferred by my phrase is the target culture(s), I intentionally do not specify that due to the
desire to incorporate concepts from the socio-educational model like students’ interest in
world languages as a factor.
However, and regardless of wording, research has supported the contention that
cross-cultural understanding is not necessarily an outcome of immersion education, as
shown in several of the studies cited previously in this chapter. Met and Lorenz
explained this phenomenon in their 1997 retrospective on two decades of U.S. immersion
programs, where they stated:
Most immersion programs do not have an organized sequence of objectives to
ensure that students leaving a program have received instruction that includes a
well-balanced continuum of age-appropriate learning experiences about the
cultures of people who speak the immersion language (1997, p. 259).
Because of the emphasis on content teaching in immersion education, and the prevailing
concerns about how to incorporate accurate L2 acquisition in that context, the fact is that
culture teaching is always at risk of taking a backseat, or no seat at all in immersion
76 programs. Even one of the first studies on French immersion education in Canada by
Swain and Lapkin (1982) concluded that, although some early total French immersion
students may have had some changes in their attitudes toward French-Canadians, the
roots of these changes could not be attributed conclusively to their participation in the
immersion program (see also Lapkin, Swain, & Shapson, 1990). Van der Keilen
replicated this finding and argument in a 1995 study set in Canada. Some of Dagenais’
work with multilingual students in Canadian French immersion schools has also found
that students in immersion schools, particularly those speaking only in English with their
families, cannot be assumed to be developing language awareness or critical
consideration of the roles that languages play in society (2005, 2008). Beyond the
Canadian context, I have already reviewed the study by Bearse and de Jong, which used
Norton’s (2000a) notion of investment to explain how students who had English as their
L1 did not consider themselves to be bicultural, while students who were L1 Spanish in
the same program did consider themselves to be bicultural (Bearse & de Jong, 2008).
These few studies comprise the body of research on the development of cross-cultural
understanding in immersion students; clearly, there is room to do more to investigate this
important topic in the literature, particularly in the one-way setting in the United States.
So why is this topic relevant to a study about L2 learning motivation in the
immersion context? Since there have been no attempts to more concretely define what
cross-cultural understanding would look like in immersion students, it is not surprising
that there have been very few studies designed to measure it. I argue that the socio-
educational model, and the way that it conceptualizes motivation as partly a function of
77 how the L2 learners consider the target culture(s), is inherently poised to address how
immersion students understand other cultures. Furthermore, the notions of investment
and the L2 Motivational Self System have both been firmly linked to the way that the L2
learners view the cultures that they are studying. As such, in addressing this topic, I
situate my study in response to other studies that have made specific programmatic
recommendations for immersion students and how they are exposed to or taught about
the target culture (see for example Van der Keilen, 1995), as well as studies that have
defined the attainment of goals about cultural education in a variety of ways (MacIntyre,
Baker, Clément, & Conrod, 2001). As with the consideration of persistence and attrition,
considering this topic sheds light both on immersion research and research in L2
motivation in general.
Conclusion
In this review of the literature, I have attempted to articulate how my study is
situated at the crossroads of two frameworks, one largely theoretical (motivation), and
one contextual (immersion education). The overlap between these two frameworks has
shaped my conceptualization of my study, and it shapes how I proceed with my analysis
and the presentation of my findings.
78
CHAPTER THREE: METHODOLOGY
The Mixed Methods Approach
In his influential, faux-retrospective article about the “paradigm wars” of the
1990s, Gage (1989) invented three scenarios for the resolution or non-resolution of the
oppositional component of qualitative and quantitative research paradigms. This droll
exploration of the differences between qualitative and quantitative research ended with a
realization that “if the social sciences did not get together, they would perish” (Gage,
1989, p. 9). This “getting together” suggested the emergent field of mixed methods
research, an area which has gained even more currency in the twenty years since Gage
wrote his text. Mixed methods studies seek to draw upon some or all aspects of both
qualitative and quantitative research (Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004). Where, how, and
why the methods are mixed has been the subject of considerable debate and discussion,
as has what, exactly, the word “mixed methods” implies. In this section, I discuss some
of the common definitions and debates around mixed methods research. I conclude with
a description of the research design, purpose, and philosophy underlying the mixed
methods approach used in this study.
Definitions
The term “mixed methods research” has been used to refer to studies in which a
number of things might be mixed, not exclusively “methods,” which have been defined
by Cohen et al. (2000) as techniques and procedures in the process of data gathering.
Indeed, only the studies where the qualitative and quantitative aspects were almost
79 completely separate have been called “mixed methods research” by some researchers
(Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004; Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003); others have termed it “an
integration of quantitative and qualitative data collection methods” by Bamberger (2000,
p. 145, emphasis his). This was to contrast with the more integrated type of mixed
methods research, which Teddlie and Tashakkori (2003) and Johnson and Onweugbuzie
(2004) have called “mixed model research;” and Bamberger referred to as “an integrated,
multidisciplinary research approach” (2000, p. 145, emphasis his). However, more
recently, in the establishment of the Journal of Mixed Methods Research and publications
like an article by Johnson, Onwuegbuzie, and Turner (2007) in that journal, many
scholars seemed to have resigned themselves to the overwhelming popularity of the use
of “mixed methods research” for all studies that combine traditionally-identified
quantitative and qualitative aspects in their composition, regardless of what aspects of the
study, exactly, are mixed. By “aspects,” I mean anything and everything from research
questions, to approaches to the data, to types of data, to techniques of data collection, to
methods for data analysis, to ways of drawing inferences or conclusions, to language and
discourse. Even though “methods” in this interpretation is extremely broad, and does not
necessarily conform to its definitions within most research design, it has come to be the
term to use. Furthermore, mixed methods theorists commonly depend on the terms
“quantitative” and “qualitative” to refer to the two types of research that exist in the field;
words like “positivist” and “interpretive,” even to refer to methodologies and paradigms
of inquiry, are seen rarely in the literature on mixed methods.
80
There are many different ways of and purposes for combining the quantitative and
qualitative aspects of a study. Some mixed methods studies almost appear to be two
studies in one (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2007). The purpose for a study like this is
“focused on the corroboration between two separate studies” (Greene, Caracelli, &
Graham, 1989, p. 259). “Marginally mixed” studies (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003) follow
more of a dominant-less dominant design, where both quantitative and qualitative
elements exist at the design level of the study, but they are centered around either
qualitative or quantitative research questions (Johnson et al, 2007). Greene et al. (1989)
identified the purposes of these types of “marginally” mixed methods studies as either
complementarity (seeking elaboration, enhancement, illustration, or clarification of
results from one method with the results from the other method) or development (seeking
to use the results from one method to help develop or inform another method) (1989, p.
259). Much more rarely, these dominant-less dominant studies might be centered around
the purpose that Greene et al. (1989) called “initiation,” which means that the study seeks
the discovery of paradox and contradiction, new perspectives or frameworks, with the
possibility of recasting questions or results of one method with questions or results from
the other method.
All mixed methods scholars seem to agree that the vast majority of mixed
methods studies presently fit into the definitions, designs, and purposes mentioned above.
However, Johnson et al. (2007), from their interviews with leading scholars in mixed
methods research, have suggested that, for some in the field, the continuum of mixed
methods research extends beyond the dominant-less dominant designs, into studies that
81 mix methodological worldviews, language, discourse, and ways of reporting findings.
However, scholars like Creswell and Plano Clark (2007), whose research designs I have
been referencing up to this point, notably do not extend the definition of mixed methods
research in this way. Although, again, these types of mixed methods studies are rare, one
design that has been associated with this definition of mixed methods research is the
Fully Integrated Mixed Design described by Teddlie and Tashakkori (2006). In this
design, the qualitative and quantitative methods are mixed in an interactive (dynamic,
reciprocal, interdependent, iterative) manner at all stages of the research.
I would like now to turn to a consideration of some of the philosophies that
underlie mixing methods. Most mixed method studies are governed by the philosophy of
mixed methods research called “pragmatism,” wherein the research question is seen to be
more important than either the method that is used or the paradigm that underlies the
method; what matters most is responsiveness to the demands of the inquiry context
(Greene & Caracelli, 2003). Some mixed methods researchers consider the pragmatic
thesis to be the foundation for all mixed methods research (Larsen-Freeman & Long,
1991; Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003). In those cases, the purpose of a mixed methods
study is matched with a design, and the study is executed accordingly. However,
pragmatism has been critiqued for “attending too little to philosophical ideas and
traditions” such that “mixed methods inquirers are insufficiently reflective and their
practice is insufficiently problematized” (Greene & Caracelli, 2003, p. 107). Pragmatism
can be taken too far, clearly. If research questions are mechanically matched with
82 methods, the bigger questions about why or how the methods are mixed are disregarded,
to the detriment of the study.
In the second philosophy of mixed methods research, the dialectic thesis,
opposing viewpoints of different methods and their interaction can create tension and be
revealing in their own ways (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003). In contrast with pragmatism,
the dialectic thesis suggests that the use of mixed methods be an open invitation to
diverse ways of thinking, knowing, and valuing, all of which can become ways to better
understand the phenomenon of interest. There is a conscious, explicit “going back and
forth” between quantitative analysis and qualitative interpretation that is seen to yield
important insights (Rocco et al., 2003, p. 596). Although some leading scholars believe
that the dialectic thesis is the future of mixed methods research (Rocco et al., 2003;
Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003), others disregard it completely, going so far as to equate
mixed methods research with pragmatism (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2007; Johnson &
Onwuegbuzie, 2004). As my own mixed methods design, purpose, and philosophy will
show, I believe that the dialectic thesis, and the more complex types of mixed methods
research associated with it, is the future for the field.
Debates
Mixed methods research is not without its detractors in the community of social
science scholars. In this section, I will briefly summarize some of the main debates about
mixed methods research, with the goal of framing my own choice of this approach for
this study.
83
Perhaps the most pervasive critique of mixed methods studies states that, because
quantitative research and qualitative research are based on contradictory theoretical
assumptions, the methods simply cannot be mixed. This is called the “incompatibility
thesis” (Yanchar & Williams, 2006). In the literature, it is apparent that there is some
disagreement about why, exactly, these two types of research are incompatible. Some
“purists” have focused on the incompatibility of the ontologies of the two paradigms that
dictate the quantitative and qualitative methods, or positivist and interpretivist,
respectively. The assumptions made about the nature of the world in quantitative
research is more of a realist ontology, where it is assumed that there are things that one
can know about the world that are fact or reality. A qualitative ontology is more
relativist, where the nature of being is dependent on individual or group perspective and
interpretation. The design of mixed methods studies, in the eyes of such purists, is
“neither possible nor sensible,” as they require researchers to simultaneously see the
world in two different ways (Greene et al., 1989, p. 257). The quantitative and
qualitative epistemologies are similarly opposed; a quantitative researcher adopts an
observer role, viewing knowledge as “hard, objective, and tangible,” while a qualitative
researcher sees knowledge as “personal, subjective and unique” (Cohen et al., 2000, p. 6).
How can the two ever be reconciled? Finally, other scholars, like McCracken (1988),
have argued that the treatment of analytic categories is at the center of the incompatibility
in mixed methods research; where the quantitative goal is to “isolate and define
categories as precisely as possible before the study is undertaken,” the goal of qualitative
research is to isolate and define these categories during “the process of research”
84 (McCracken, 1988, p. 16). This difference, also characterized as a difference between
induction and deduction, has suggested that the direction of reasoning is opposed in the
two methods.
However, Bryman’s (2007) research on current researcher attitudes about mixed
methods studies has indicated that very few actually cite what he terms “the ontological
divide” as a critique of mixed methods studies, suggesting that the incompatibility thesis
is actually somewhat tangential to the concerns of contemporary researchers. Indeed, in
recent years, proponents of mixed methods research have put forth a competing
“compatibility thesis.” Many of these proponents have connected mixed methods’
compatibility with the philosophy of pragmatism; mixed methods have been cited
repeatedly for their utility in comparison with single approach designs. One aspect of
this utility relates to (perhaps obviously) the compatibility of the two methods; the
strengths and weaknesses of quantitative research are seen as balanced by the weaknesses
and strengths of qualitative research, creating a study (when the phases are implemented
independently) that is supremely complementary and compatible through the process of
“counteracting biases” (Greene et al., 1989, p. 259; see also Brewer & Hunter, 2006;
Cohen et al., 2000; Creswell & Plano Clark, 2007; Kozel & Parker, 2000; McCracken,
1988). Additionally, scholars have cited the benefits of accessing a wider range of data
in a mixed methods study (Brewer & Hunter, 2006; Creswell & Plano Clark, 2007;
Greene et al., 1989; McCracken, 1988). Some have argued that this feature increases the
confidence or legitimacy of the study’s findings (Cohen et al., 2000; Kozel & Parker,
2000). Finally, as Teddlie and Tashakkori (2003) have stated, mixed methods studies can
85 answer research questions other methodologies cannot, for instance, being able to
concurrently answer confirmatory and exploratory questions, therefore verifying and
generating theory in the same study (2003, p. 15).
Before concluding, it is important to make a distinction here between the tenets of
the “compatibility thesis” and the concept of “triangulation” in research methodology. In
the previous paragraph, I outlined some of the reasons that researchers have given for the
compatibility of quantitative and qualitative approaches in mixed methods studies. As
we can see, words like “confidence,” “legitimacy,” and “verification” have been used in
the literature in support of mixed methods research, specifically in terms of how mixed
methods research takes advantage of the balance of strengths and weaknesses in
qualitative and quantitative research. However, this is not triangulation. First of all, as
Johnson et al. (2007) pointed out, referring to triangulation as a way to validate results is
more of a throwback to the “multiple operationalism” predecessor of mixed methods
research, where using more than one method was more of a measurement and construct
validation technique than it was a full research methodology (2007, p. 114). As opposed
to other types of triangulation like time triangulation or investigator triangulation, the
purpose of what is called triangulation in mixed methods studies is not related to the
validation of findings. That is, it is not intended for the findings from one of the methods
to replicate and verify that the findings from the other method are not method-specific. It
is to provide a more complete picture of something, presumably addressing different
aspects or parts of the phenomenon being studied (Gorard & Taylor, 2004).
86 As Creswell and Plano Clark (2007) emphasized, “[m]ixed methods researchers
need a repertoire of strategies for establishing rigor within their mixed methods studies,
and these strategies need to reflect both the paradigm guiding the study and the specific
design used in the study” (p. 190). That is, validity and rigor are not guaranteed simply
because a given research study features a mixed methods design. When mixed methods
scholars make that mistake, their studies, and the reputation of mixed methods in general,
suffer as a result. Not surprisingly, Tashakkori and Teddlie (2003a) suggested, in the
future of mixed methods research, that scholars abandon the “magical” term of
“triangulation” due to its overuse and misuse in the field (2003a, p. 674).
In conclusion, as Gorard and Taylor (2004) stated, over time, it seems that
researchers have exaggerated technical and philosophical differences into a paradigm.
Other defenders of mixed methods research have agreed, criticizing the tendency of the
purists to put every single characteristic of qualitative research in stark contrast with
every characteristic of quantitative work (see for example, Gage, 1989; Yin, 2006).
There is room for more exploration, expansion, and reconsideration in social science
research about the dichotomizing influence of qualitative versus quantitative research.
Hopefully, this study will take a small step in that direction.
The Mixed Methods Design and Philosophy of This Study
I believe that a mixed methods study is the best way for me to address the
questions and concerns of my topic for a number of reasons. McInerney (1998) has
characterized the construct of motivation as a “dilemma” of a choice between a
quantitative ontology and epistemology (where everyone is presumed to be motivated by
87 the same forces irrespective of cultural background) and qualitative ontology and
epistemology (wherein motivation is culture and/or learner specific, and there are no
generalities) (1998, p. 3; see also Ushioda, 2009). The very nature of the motivation
construct thus suggests a seriously fascinating interplay between the individual and the
collective, human agency and culture, and/or free will and determinism. Furthermore, in
using a mixed methods approach, I am positioning myself to respond directly to the
research and the theoretical framework of the socio-educational model that is based on
the quantitative methods of data collection and analysis. As we have seen, the study of
L2 learning motivation has not commonly been conducted in a qualitative paradigm,
although many researchers have identified its potential utility (see for instance Dörnyei,
2003; Lyons, 2009; Syed, 2001; Ushioda, 2009). The use of qualitative research to look
at L2 learning motivation alongside the more customary quantitative research can shed
light on the complexities of L2 learning motivation in very revealing and important ways,
and it can expand the way that researchers construct their research on L2 learning
motivation as well.
I would thus characterize the design of this study as a modified Explanatory
Design (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2007) also called a “Sequential Mixed Design” (Teddlie
& Tashakkori, 2006). In this design, qualitative methods are used to expand upon or
elaborate on quantitative data. This design thus represents what Teddlie and Tashakkori
(2003) have called a “marginally mixed” study, which combines quantitative and
qualitative elements at the design level and makes interpretations somehow based on the
combined results of both methods. This type of study is often centered around either
88 Table 3.1
Correspondence of Research Questions, Analysis Procedures, and Data Sources
Research Questions Analysis Procedures Data Sources
Qualitative: Theme analysis
of interviews
• Student interviews
Quantitative: Calculation of
correlations among the
subscales of Part One
(AMTB) of student surveys
• Student surveys
Quantitative: Calculation of
effect sizes of responses on
parent surveys with AMTB
subscales
• Student surveys • Parent surveys
Quantitative: Calculation of
Cohen’s kappa coefficient
between parent and student
proficiency sections
• Student surveys • Parent surveys
Mixed methods: Exploration
of integrated findings
• All data sources
RQ1: What contributes to the second language (L2) learning motivation of elementary immersion program graduates? How do these motivating factors interrelate?
Mixed methods: Mini case
studies
• All data sources
Qualitative: Theme analysis
of interviews
• Student interviews
Quantitative: Calculation of
effect sizes of groupings on
AMTB subscales
• Student surveys • Parent surveys
Quantitative: Calculation of
Cohen’s kappa coefficient
between parent and student
proficiency sections
• Student surveys • Parent surveys
RQ2: What does an examination of the L2 learning motivation of early adolescent immersion graduates reveal about important issues in immersion education, such as: (a) Issues about persistence in and attrition from immersion programs? (b) Issues about the development of cross-cultural understanding in immersion students?
Mixed methods: Exploration
of integrated findings
• All data sources
Mixed methods: Exploration of integrated findings
• All data sources RQ3: In what ways do the data collected through student interviews provide insight into the data generated by the results of the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery?
Mixed methods: Mini case studies
• All data sources
89 qualitative or quantitative research questions, and, generally speaking, its inferences
follow suit (Johnson et al., 2007). The primary thrust of the study is interpretive, but my
research questions are not all qualitative or quantitative questions, and indeed, one of the
questions (RQ3) specifically addresses a comparison between the two methods. Some
procedures for data analysis are similarly mixed (see Table 3.1). My purpose in using
such a design, termed “initiation” by Greene et al. (1989; see also Teddlie & Tashakkori,
2006) is both to address issues already discussed in the literature about L2 learning
motivation, but also to contribute to the knowledge base in an exploratory manner; to
seek new perspectives and frameworks, possibly through the identification of paradox
and contradiction in the two types of data. As such, my philosophy of mixed methods
research corresponds with the dialectic thesis, where opposing viewpoints of different
methods and their interaction can create tension and be revealing in their own ways
(Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003).
Thus, I conducted my data analysis in the following four phases: an examination
of the qualitative interview data for common themes; a statistical analysis of the
quantitative survey data; an integrated consideration of the qualitative and quantitative
findings; and, finally, a close reading of all of the data collected about certain selected
student cases. Table 3.1 outlines how those analysis procedures correspond to the
research questions outlined in Chapter One; the three main data sources for this study
(student surveys, parent surveys, and student interviews); and the philosophy and design
of my mixed methods study. I will now define and elaborate on these parts of my study.
90
Schools: The Immersion Contexts
This study includes students who graduated from one of five one-way early total
immersion programs in French or Spanish. One-way total immersion has been
traditionally defined as a program serving majority language students (in the United
States, English-language speakers) that offers 100% L2 subject matter instruction in the
early grades, introducing L1 subject matter instruction between second and fifth grades
and increasing its amount every year (Genesee, 2008). The schools were chosen from
one metropolitan area with many language immersion schools based on the following
criteria:
• They all define themselves as one-way early total immersion programs, and
they feature the characteristics of such a program model (see below).
• They are all public elementary schools (either grades K-5 or K-6) that are
linked to a completely separate middle school or junior high school
continuation program in the same district.6
• They have all been in operation for more than ten years. This guarantees that
the population of students consulted in the study are not the first cohort who
experienced the transition from elementary to middle/junior high school.
Although it was not a criterion for inclusion in this study, it so happens that the
immersion programs featured in the five elementary schools are also very similar, all
6 Although one of the programs (Program E) has the elementary immersion and middle school continuation programs housed in the same physical building, the two schools (elementary and middle) are completely functionally separate, with different teaching and administrative staff, classrooms, and schedules. Different statistics are provided to the state Department of Education about each of these two schools.
91 Table 3.2
Immersion Continuation Program Characteristics7
Program Core classes taught in target
language, first grade of
continuation8
Can immersion
continuation
students take an
additional world
language?
Percent of 2007
graduates in district
immersion
continuation
program
A (4) Spanish language arts, history,
math, life science
Yes 57.3
B (1-2) French language arts, some
form of French social studies
Yes 42.8
C (3) French language arts, social
studies, math
No 89.0
D (2) Spanish language arts, social
studies
Yes 81.4
E (4) Spanish language arts,
science, math, social studies
No 74.5
adhering loosely to the early total immersion definition provided above (Genesee, 2008).
The curriculum in all five schools begins in kindergarten and first grade with content
class instruction (generally defined in these schools as math, science, social
studies/history, and language arts) completely in the target language. This means that
initial literacy is developed in the target language. “Specialist” courses (physical
7 Information for this table was obtained from personal communication with teachers and administrators, as well as school websites. 8 Some programs were much more straightforward about what classes were taught in the target language. As one administrator said, “Sometimes, the language of instruction is at the teacher’s discretion.”
92 education, music, art) are most commonly only offered in English. Formal instruction in
English is introduced in either the second or third grade with an English language arts
class. All other content class instruction continues in the target language through the last
year of elementary school. As a result of the inclusion of the specialist courses in the
curriculum, by fifth or sixth grade, 40% to 50% of the instructional time is in English.
The middle/junior high school immersion continuation programs differ more
markedly than do their corresponding elementary programs. Many immersion education
researchers have argued that middle school immersion continuation programs in the
United States, which articulate from early immersion programs, face considerable
challenges (see for example Fortune & Jorstad, 1996; Met & Lorenz, 1997). In this
country, the one-way continuing program model in middle grades is customarily
characterized as having a minimum of two year-long content courses taught solely in the
L2 (Fortune & Tedick, 2008). The five immersion continuation programs featured in this
study are evidence of a certain lack of uniformity beyond that basic characteristic, and in
the case of Program B9, it is unclear whether even that criterion is met. As shown in
Table 3.2, the only similarity among the five continuation programs featured in this study
is the presence of a target language “Language Arts” class. Programs A and E offer three
other content courses beyond the language arts class; Program B does not consistently
offer any; and Programs C and D fall somewhere in between. The program
9 “Program” is used here to identify the entire immersion program, including the elementary immersion school and the middle school/junior high school immersion continuation program. “School” designates the elementary immersion school only; when referring to students, they will be identified by “School” and not “Program,” since non-continuing students are not a part of the “Program.”
93 Table 3.3
Program Demographics10
Population # Students (Grades)
Free/Red. Lunch %
White %
Black %
Hispanic %
Asian % American Indian %
Program A (Urban, Spanish)
Elementary 713 (K-6) 44 37.7 12.8 45.9 2.0 1.7
Jr. High 770 (7, 8) 70 21.9 34.9 18.4 23.6 1.0
District 39050 71 25 30 13 30 2
Program B (Urban, French)
Elementary 449 (K-6) 22 67.5 15.4 8.5 8.0 0.7
Jr. High 770 (7, 8) 70 21.9 34.9 18.4 23.6 1.0
District 39050 71 25 30 13 30 2
Program C (Suburban, French)
Elementary 622 (K-5) 0 90 1.0 2.9 6.1 0.0
Middle 1250 (6-9) 8 86.7 5.8 2.2 5.3 0.1
District 7691 7 85 6 2 6 0
Program D (Suburban, Spanish)
Elementary 578 (K-6) 7 78.9 8.5 8.5 4.2 0.0
Jr. High 609 (7, 8) 34 63.1 25.1 5.6 5.1 1.2
District 4177 27 66 21 7 6 1
Program E (Suburban, Spanish)
Elementary 623 (K-5) 8 81.2 5.6 9.2 3.4 0.6
Middle 805 (6-8) 37 57.5 24.7 9.8 6.7 1.2
District 12730 38 56 26 10 8 1
Note. The information about the middle/junior high schools reflect the total school population, including
but not limited to the students in the immersion continuation program. The district information is about the
entire district population as well, not just the immersion population in the district.
10 This information is based on 2007-2008 reported statistics from 2008 School Report Cards and district demographics, available on State Department of Education website. To protect the anonymity of the schools, this is all that I can reveal about this source.
94 characteristics of the five different immersion continuation programs, therefore, differ
more markedly than do the elementary immersion programs. Other ways that the
immersion continuation programs differ, also summarized in Table 3.2, are in the option
for their students to take a foreign language other than the immersion language, and in the
ultimate percentage of students in the elementary graduating classes of 2007 who chose
to persist in the immersion program. Both of these pieces of information will be
particularly relevant to Chapter Four, when the issues of persistence and attrition in
immersion programs are examined.
Table 3.3 offers a summary of demographic information about this study’s five
elementary immersion schools as well as the middle/junior high schools and school
districts housing the immersion continuation programs for those elementary schools.
Similarities among the demographics related to the five programs are significant. The
elementary immersion schools are all less socioeconomically and racially diverse than
their corresponding middle/junior high immersion continuation schools (although to
much different extents), and the middle/junior high schools are also more similar to their
district’s general demographics than are the elementary immersion schools. The
middle/junior high schools also contain more students in general and per grade level than
the elementary immersion schools. An unrelated but important point is that no single
middle/junior high school housing the immersion continuation programs met Adequate
Yearly Progress (AYP) for the state in 2008, a measure mandated by No Child Left
Behind as a way to assess a school’s success. All of the elementary immersion schools,
however, did meet AYP. This description of the demographic differences between the
95 elementary and the middle/junior high schools in this study offers a general picture of
some of the implications of the transition from elementary to middle/junior high school in
the five schools studied.
It is worth highlighting some important facts about each immersion program’s
unique demographics in order to understand more about the five contexts that will be
considered simultaneously in this study.
• Note that elementary School A features the highest percentage of learners of
Hispanic heritage (45.9%) of all of the schools in this study, even though the
school defines itself according to the one-way total immersion program model
and thus operates under the assumption that most of its students are majority
language speakers (Genesee, 2008). I accept the school’s definition, and thus
conclude that a Hispanic heritage does not necessarily mean Spanish dominant for
the students in this school, although it certainly might suggest more exposure to
Spanish in the home and home community; this is examined more in Chapter
Five. In comparison with the other elementary schools in this study, School A is
certainly the most racially and socioeconomically diverse; it is the only school
which does not have a majority of White students.
• Program B, with the same continuing junior high and in the same district as
Program A, contrasts with the junior high school and the district in its low
percentage of free/reduced lunch recipients and high percentage of White
students. Although Black students comprise a higher percentage of the student
population at elementary Program B than at any other elementary school in the
96
study, this percentage is still much less than in the junior high school and the
district. Program B features one of the most marked demographic differences
between its elementary immersion school and the junior high school housing its
immersion continuation program in the five schools in this study.
• The elementary, middle school, and district associated with Program C are clearly
the most affluent and least racially diverse in this study.
• Program D features almost a fivefold jump in the percentage of free/reduced
lunch students from the elementary to the junior high school housing the
continuation program; the junior high school also has a higher percentage of
free/reduced lunch students than the district as a whole. The junior high’s racial
diversity is characterized primarily by a smaller percentage of White students and
a much higher percentage of Black students than at the elementary school. This
district is also the smallest in the study, and there is only one junior high option
for students who wish to remain in the district.
• In the case of Program E, as noted above, the elementary immersion school and
the middle school housing the immersion continuation program are housed in the
same school building, although they are effectively completely separate. Program
E is similar in many ways to suburban, Program D, including a fivefold jump in
percentage of free/reduced lunch students from the elementary to the middle
school housing the continuation program. Again, the racial diversity in the
middle school is characterized by fewer White students and more Black students
than in the elementary immersion school. One notable difference between
97
Programs D and E is that the middle school housing the continuation program in
Program E’s situation reflects the district’s demographics almost exactly.
The five different immersion programs featured in this study therefore compare and
contrast in interesting ways. Note that many crucial differences relate to the nature of the
immersion continuation program, as this will be very pertinent to the analysis of the issue
relating to student persistence in and attrition from immersion education in Chapter Four.
Participants
The primary target population of this study is the 358 students who graduated in
spring 2007 from the five elementary schools outlined above. Students from Schools C
and E were sixth graders at the time of the study, and students from Schools A, B, and D
were seventh graders. I will summarize the process that I used to contact these
participants in the next section. Because I contacted all 2007 graduates, the target
population included students who chose to continue in the immersion continuation
program in their district, as well as students who chose to pursue other educational
options.11 The secondary target population is the parents/guardians of the student
participants.
The overall survey response rate for this study was 36% (131 responses).
11 I have elected to use the term, “continuing” to refer to the students who were in the district’s designated immersion continuation program at the time that they filled out the surveys. “Non-continuing,” therefore, refers to students who were not enrolled in that continuation program. Although I was hesitant to define this latter group by a negative, I found it difficult to find a specific term to refer to that entire group, since they made a variety of choices, including pursuing target-language content instruction in other venues, going to the school where the immersion continuation program was housed but in an English monolingual strand, or choosing some hybrid type of home schooling. The term “non-continuing” seemed the most expeditious for the purposes of my study.
98 Table 3.4
Number of Valid Survey Responses and Response Rates
Continuing Non-continuing
School Male Female Male Female
Total
Response Rate
A 9 5 2 5 21 28%
B 2 1 1 5 9 32%
C 18 25 1 2 46 51%
D 1 13 3 3 20 29%
E 12 12 2 9 35 37%
OVERALL 42 56 9 24 131 36%
Although I was not able to obtain detailed information about the non-responders, because
the state statistics are generated at the school level, I was able to calculate the percentage
of students who had remained in the immersion continuation program by comparing the
number of 2007 graduates whom I contacted and the number of students from the same
class who were in the continuation program. I obtained this latter figure by asking the
middle/junior high schools. I found that 73.5% (263) of the 358 students in the
population had chosen to continue with the immersion continuation program. In
comparison, 74.8% (98) of the 131 survey respondents were continuing. Therefore, the
sample of survey respondents in this study roughly mirrors the proportion of continuing
students in the population. Unfortunately, other statistics about student characteristics in
the population (like gender, for example) were not available for similar tests of
99 representativeness.
Table 3.4 summarizes the survey responses and corresponding response rates,
divided by school, then further subdivided by gender and whether or not the students
were enrolled in the immersion continuation program. A “valid response,” for the
purposes of this study, is a response which included completed surveys from both the
parent and the student who fit the criteria for participation.
Out of the 131 survey responses in both continuing and non-continuing groups,
most came from continuing females, although there were representatives from both
genders. The school with the highest response rate was School C, followed by School E.
Schools A, B, and D all had similar response rates. In order to be as unintrusive as
possible, I did not ask about students’ racial/ethnic backgrounds or their parents’ income
levels, so I cannot provide information about how representative they were of their
schools. Some information about the home background characteristics was collected via
the parent surveys; that information is summarized in Appendix A. An important
subgroup of this participant group was the students whom I interviewed for the study (see
Table 3.5 in the next section). My procedures and guidelines for contacting and selecting
all survey and interview participants are outlined next.
Data Sources
Obtaining Access
University of Minnesota Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval was sought
and granted for this study in January, 2008 (see Appendix B), with the contingency that I
submit a letter of approval from each school district involved in the study. I did not
100 contact any potential participants until approval for that particular district had been
received and submitted successfully to the University of Minnesota IRB. Approval from
all districts was received, however to preserve their anonymity I will not provide
evidence of those approvals with this study.
Procedures for Initial Contact of Target Population
In four of the five participating schools, my initial contact with the target
population was made via postal mail addressed to the parent/guardian of the 2007
elementary immersion school graduate, using postal addresses that were on file in
computer systems in the district. I supplied already assembled, sealed, and stamped
packets to either the elementary school, the district office, or the middle/junior high
school, depending on district preference. Those offices printed out address labels that
reflected all 2007 graduates of the elementary immersion school, affixed them, and put
the packets in the mail. Due to the fact that the districts only agreed to provide and affix
address labels for one mailing, I was not able to send multiple reminders to potential
participants about the surveys. Time and cost constraints further limited this possibility.
Since my response rates were acceptable with this method of initial contact, I feel that
this response strategy was acceptable as well (Dillman, 2000).
The district affiliated with School C preferred that I take a different approach.
According to their preference, I initially contacted continuing students solely via an
online blackboard system easily and frequently accessed by the parent population.
Administrators mailed out packets to the non-continuing students by looking up those
students individually and following a procedure as outlined above. However, this
101 approach produced an overall response rate of only 11%. After I consulted further with
the district, they allowed me to make packets identical to those mailed in the other
districts, and I dropped those off with a teacher in the continuation program, who gave
one to each student at school to take home to their parents. As Table 3.4 reflects, this
procedure eventually resulted in a response rate of 51% with those elementary immersion
graduates, the highest response rate of the five schools.
The packets all included the following:
1. A cover letter describing the study (Appendix C). For the three Spanish
immersion schools (Schools A, D, and E), I copied a Spanish translation
of the letter printed on the back of the English version (Appendix D). This
letter included the same information as the English version, and it
additionally suggested that individuals interested in receiving the materials
in Spanish contact me directly to request them. No one contacted me in
response to this letter.
2. A parent consent form (Appendix E).
3. A parent survey (Appendix F), including information on how to access the
same survey online if they preferred.
4. A student survey (Appendix G), including information on how to access
the same survey online if they preferred.
5. A stamped, addressed return envelope, labeled with instructions to return
the consent form and two surveys in it.
6. An incentive: a pencil labeled: “I helped Pam finish her dissertation.”
102
At the top of each paper survey, both parents and students were informed as to
how to access the surveys online. Fourteen of the 131 surveys were completed online;
the rest were returned on paper in the mail. I was able to keep track of each survey
response via a code comprised of a letter (which designated the elementary immersion
school) and four numbers written on the top of each survey. The parent and student
surveys mailed to each household were assigned the same code. The codes primarily
served to reassure me that all completed surveys were valid, whether they were
completed on paper or online. I kept track of the codes written on the surveys, so I knew
that every survey returned to me or submitted online was unique and sent out by me
personally to an individual who met the inclusion criteria. Additionally, these codes
served a few other, minor purposes; for instance, several parent and student surveys were
returned separately or in different formats, and the codes allowed me to pair them up
accurately.
Because of the expected delays and inconsistencies associated with conducting
research in four different school districts involving nine different schools, the packets
were not all mailed at the same time. However, the packets associated with each
individual elementary immersion school (with the exception of School C, outlined above)
were all sent on the same day. The first set of packets were mailed to the first elementary
immersion school in early February 2008, and the last set were mailed to the last school
in April 2008. A statistically insignificant number (7) of whole packets were returned
through the mail, indicating that they did not reach their intended recipients. I received
responses on the surveys from mid-February 2008 through mid-July 2008.
103
Parent Survey
The parent survey (Appendix F) has three sections, each of which provides
slightly different information for the purposes of this study. Part One was primarily
designed to elicit information from the parents’ perspective about the students’ home
exposure to other languages and cultures, and other pertinent home background
characteristics. I based most of the questions for this section on selected factors
investigated by studies that have linked home background characteristics with language
learning motivation (see for example Dagenais & Day, 1999; Gardner, Masgoret, &
Tremblay, 1999; Sung & Padilla, 1998). These factors include travel opportunities,
exposure to other languages in the home, family and friend connections to other cultures
and languages, and whether or not a parent speaks the target language of the immersion
program in question. Three yes/no questions (numbers 7, 8, and 9) about the languages
spoken in the home were taken directly from the Home Language Questionnaire (2005)
administered to every student in the state where the study took place. Results from this
first section of the parent survey have been provided in Appendix A.
Part Two of the parent survey is a parental assessment of the student’s L2
proficiency. These ten questions are Likert-scale items where parents had to rate their
child’s ability to complete different communicative tasks in the target language, adapted
from Fortune (2001). Ten identical questions were asked in the student survey. These
questions served the purpose of measuring the agreement that parents and students in
immersion programs might have in an assessment of the student’s language proficiency.
104
Part Three of the parent survey includes two open-ended questions: one that asks
about why the student was enrolled in the immersion program in the first place, and one
that asks how the decision was made whether or not to continue between elementary and
middle/junior high school. These open-ended questions served the purpose of further
providing information about parent attitudes about the immersion programs. Because the
focus of this study was not parent attitudes, but rather student attitudes, these questions
largely provided information for the mini case studies that comprised the last stage of
analysis for this study.
The parent survey concludes with some procedural questions that helped me to
identify potential participants for the interview stage of the research.
Student Survey
The student survey (Appendix G) has two sections. Part One, about their
language learning motivation, was modeled on the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery
(AMTB) developed in conjunction with the socio-educational model (Gardner, 1985b).
My adaptations to the AMTB had one major purpose: to encourage the most accurate
student responses, given the context of early adolescent immersion graduates. This type
of adaptation has been encouraged by Gardner and his colleagues, who have stated,
“People are encouraged not to simply take a set of items [off of the AMTB] and
administer them unthinkingly in any context” (1985b, p. 525).
This meant, perhaps most importantly, that I removed questions meant to
encourage the respondents to assess their language teacher or their language course.
Because immersion students take their content classes in the target language, and do not
105 have one “language teacher” or “language course” per se, I knew that those questions
would be too confusing for the young students completing the survey. As we can see
above in the description of the middle/junior high school continuation programs,
questions about a “language course” or a “language teacher” could, to some students,
appear to be questions about their middle/junior high school (Target) Language Arts
course, rather than a reflection on their general experiences as immersion students. This
distinction will enter into my analysis in Chapter Four. As such, I removed all questions
about the “language teacher.” I also removed many of the questions about “language
course,” although I was able to preserve the subscale “Language class anxiety” with few
alterations. In most of those items, I could simply remove the phrase “in language class”
and still maintain the same general reference to language learning anxiety. Those that
could not be changed in this way were excised.
I made other conservative alterations to the AMTB as well. I altered the wording
of the questions to be clearer, simpler, and more straightforward to young survey
respondents in the United States. I removed questions that could be interpreted in
multiple ways in their context. Finally, I sought to create a shorter instrument given the
short attention spans of early adolescents, while still preserving the integrity of the
subscales and maintaining a sufficient number of questions to keep the subscales robust.
As a result of these changes, all of the first section of the student survey are Likert scale
items that fit into one of eight categories: (a) attitudes toward the target community; (b)
interest in world languages; (c) attitudes toward learning the target language (positively-
worded statements); (d) attitudes toward learning the target language (negatively-worded
106 statements); (e) integrative orientation; (f) instrumental orientation; (g) target language
use anxiety (negatively-worded statements); (h) parental encouragement.12
Part Two of the survey is a self assessment of the student’s L2 proficiency. Just
as in the parent survey, these ten questions are Likert-scale items where students had to
rate their own ability to complete different communicative tasks in the target language,
adapted from Fortune (2001). Ten identical questions were asked in the parent survey.
Again, these questions served the purpose of measuring the agreement that parents and
students in immersion programs might have in an assessment of the student’s language
proficiency.
Procedures for Identifying and Selecting Student Interviewees
Parents from four of the five elementary immersion schools (with the exception of
School C, which I will describe below) were provided with two options for participating
in this study: to complete the two surveys described above, or to complete the two
surveys and also to elect to have the student participate in interviews13. The parents were
asked on the last page of their survey if they would prefer to only participate in the
surveys, or if they would also be willing to have their child participate in the interviews
(see Appendix F). This choice was provided in order to get as large a response rate on
the surveys as possible, since I predicted that some potential participants would be more
12 The implications of using of Likert-type scales to measure behavioral items is addressed in my discussion of my analysis procedures for this survey. 13 Although I ended up only conducting one individual interview with each interview participant, the cover letter (Appendix C, Appendix D), parent consent form (Appendix D), and parent survey (Appendix E) all indicated that the student would be contacted for two interviews, one individual and one group. I eventually eliminated this second interview because of time and logistical constraints.
107 willing to just complete surveys than to complete surveys and have the student be
interviewed. I also informed the parents that the students who participated in the
interviews would receive a $10 gift card for a local discount superstore. Thus, the
parents who selected Option 1 (surveys only) returned the consent form and the two
completed surveys to me. That was the extent of their participation in the study. The
parents who selected Option 2 (surveys and interviews) also returned the consent form
and the two completed surveys. The parents additionally provided me with the means to
contact their child to schedule the individual interview, and they informed me when they
would prefer for their child to meet with me: before school, at a district-approved time
during the school day, or after school. Ultimately, in the four elementary immersion
schools where this procedure applied, approximately 67 parents volunteered their
children to be interviewed.
I selected interviewees based on a combination of convenience and stratified
sampling, with the goal of interviewing between five and eight students per elementary
immersion school in order to collect a manageable quantity of data. Given that I was not
seeking to generalize the results of the interviews to the population, not every member of
the population of elementary immersion graduates had an equal chance of being included
in the sample of interviewees. My sample was first limited by the fact that parents had to
agree to allow me to interview their child, and then further limited by my non-probability
sampling techniques, described below.
I began the selection process as soon as I began receiving surveys from Option 2
respondents. I contacted the first several Option 2 respondents in every school as soon as
108 I received their surveys. This followed the principle of convenience sampling, which
involves choosing the nearest individuals to serve as respondents and continuing that
process until the required sample size has been obtained (Cohen et al., 2000).
Complicating this process, as I had foreseen, I found that contacting potential student
participants did not necessarily mean that I would get a response and an interview
scheduled. I attribute this in large part to the fact that the parents were the ones who
volunteered their child to be interviewed, and in some cases the children were not as
willing to participate. However, this potential difficulty allowed me to combine my
convenience sampling technique with a modified stratified sampling (also called
dimensional sampling for non-probability sampling) of the population (Cohen et al.,
2000).
Therefore, as I continued to receive Option 2 survey responses from a given
school, I also kept track of these respondents in a spreadsheet. In this spreadsheet, I
noted three key factors: (a) the elementary immersion school of the Option 2 students; (b)
whether or not they had continued in the immersion program; and (c) their gender. I
sought to have at least one interview participant who fit every combination of factors of
interest. Table 3.5 summarizes my interview respondent characteristics; I did manage to
interview at least one student in each category.
In Program C, where I originally contacted potential continuing participants via
the school’s online blackboard system and only later sent out paper surveys, I sampled
more for convenience than in the other programs. The original contact techniques for the
continuing immersion students resulted in very few responses, and I interviewed all five
109 Table 3.5 Number of Student Interviewees
Continuing Non-continuing
School Male Female Male Female
Total
A 3 1 1 1 6
B 1 1 1 2 5
C 1 4 1 1 7
D 1 4 1 2 8
E 2 2 1 2 7
OVERALL 8 12 5 8 33
of the student participants whose parents responded in that first wave. I also received
replies from two non-continuing students whom I was able to interview. This meant that,
by the time that I was able to distribute the packets to the rest of the students, I no longer
needed interview participants to meet my criteria. As such, I did not include Option 2 in
the parent surveys for that second wave.
Student Interviews
Beginning in late February 2008 and continuing through early June 2008, I
conducted interviews with 33 student participants. As with the mailing of the surveys,
these interviews were staggered due to the delays and inconsistencies in receiving
approval for research in the four different school districts. The interviews associated with
each immersion program were all roughly grouped together in time.
110
These semi-structured student interviews lasted between 15 and 40 minutes,
depending on the duration of the student’s responses. Most interviews took place at the
student’s middle/junior high school, at the library/media center where we were safely out
of hearing range of any other students or adults. These interviews occurred during a
designated time of the school day (for instance, during a study hall or advisory period)
that had been prearranged with administrators and teachers at the school, or before or
after school. If this was not a preferred option for the students and their parents, I met
other interviewees in a variety of locations of their choosing: at their homes, local
coffeehouses, or their parents’ workplaces. I asked parents and other individuals to avoid
being present for the interviews, although in a very few interviews, I believe that the
parents were in earshot of the interviews. In those few cases, the students might have
known that their parents were overhearing their interviews. In one unavoidable
circumstance, I interviewed two students together, although I recorded them separately,
asking the same questions twice. I will note these exceptions in my findings when I
judge them to be relevant to my analysis. I began each interview by explaining the study
and having the student read and sign an assent form (Appendix H). If the student did not
have any questions, I began recording the interview using a small digital recorder.
I followed a consistent interview protocol (Appendix I) during every student
interview. I did not use the term “motivation” at any point in these interviews, primarily
because I was concerned that the early adolescent student participants would not interpret
it in a uniform way, or that they simply would not understand what I meant. As such, I
followed in the footsteps of a study by Daniels and Arapostathis (2005). In this study, the
111 authors sought to hear from what they termed “reluctant” high school learners about what
the students saw as successes and failures in school. Through questions about students’
memories, their happy and unhappy moments, and their school experiences in general,
the authors “discovered a relationship between the students’ perspectives and the
literature on human motivation and student achievement” (2005, p. 42). I found an
analogous connection in a pilot study on a similar topic (Wesely, 2009) and with a similar
group of participants, and I trusted that this would be the same case for this study.
Although I am a former French teacher who worked for eight years in a traditional
(non-immersion) environment with early adolescents, I felt that it was important to
position myself to the participants as someone with no particular affinity with their
teachers or with language education, beyond my research interests. Because of my lack
of personal experience as an immersion educator, I was easily able to act the role of the
naïf who needed the students to explain their favorite games or experiences in immersion
education to me. However, I am sure that I still looked like a teacher (or perhaps a
parent) to the students due to my age and general style of casual professional dress.
In my interview protocol, I first asked students to reflect generally on their
language learning experiences, and secondly, about motivational factors in the socio-
educational model (Appendix I). For the first part, again mimicking the work by Daniels
and Arapostathis (2005), I asked students about “favorite” and “least favorite” things
about learning the target language, and also for some of their “best” and “worst”
memories. I also prompted them to tell me about whether they have ever been proud or
nervous about communicating in the target language, and what their friends thought
112 about their own experiences learning the language. These questions served to flesh out
their experiences from a number of perspectives, since in some cases students had harder
time thinking of responses to the very general initial questions. I followed these
questions with general inquiries into their decision to continue (or not to continue) with
immersion education. For the second part, I deliberately fashioned questions about each
of the subscales on the AMTB; for instance, for the “Opinions about (target language)-
speaking people” subscale, I ask, “Tell me about some (target language)-speaking people
that you know. What are (target language)-speaking people like?” This allowed me to
increase the likelihood that my qualitative interview data would directly address
motivational factors that would inevitably be a part of the statistical analysis of the
quantitative data; however, it did not explicitly limit the students’ responses to those
factors only. In addition to these planned questions, as befits a semi-structured interview,
I added questions for clarification or elaboration purposes. After ending the interview, I
gave the student the $10 gift card.
Data Analysis
Phase One: Preliminary Data Analysis during Data Collection
I believe that, as Rubin and Rubin (2005) state, “analysis occurs throughout the
research” when conducting qualitative interviews. The ongoing analysis begins with the
first interview, and continues through the writing of the last word of the study. As such,
the earliest stages of data collection also marked the earliest stages of data analysis in this
study. Given that I conducted 33 interviews over the course of more than three months, I
made an effort to work with this idea of ongoing early analysis. I took informal notes on
113 ideas and themes that emerged during the interviews, and when appropriate, I slightly
altered later interviews to question students about those themes. However, the presence
of an interview protocol kept the general direction and the foundational questions of my
interviews uniform. That interview protocol did not change; the alterations in the
interviews only took the form of some follow-up questions when I judged that the
students might have more to say about a specific theme that I had heard in previous
interviews.
One other factor might have influenced this early analysis. During the months of
data collection for this study, I was in the process of preparing a manuscript about its
pilot study for submission to a peer-reviewed journal (Wesely, 2009). The pilot study,
conducted the previous school year and with different students, shared a number of
similarities with this study, specifically in terms of the instruments used (the surveys and
the interview protocol) and the target population. The instruments did not change very
much between the pilot study and this study. However, the pilot study was conducted on
a much smaller scale, with only six student participants from one elementary immersion
school. Moreover, I did not make an effort to mix qualitative and quantitative approaches
in that study, instead depending solely on a qualitative approach to guide my analysis.
The pilot study was an interpretive multiple case study, with each student in the study
constituting one case. Nevertheless, naturally, many of the same themes and ideas arose
in the pilot study that I would also hear and pursue in data analysis for this study. The
fact that I was preparing a final manuscript for this pilot study as I was interviewing
students undoubtedly had some influence on some of the themes that I observed in the
114 interviews. However, I did try to keep these different studies separate, and indeed, my
analysis on this larger, mixed methods study followed a much different path.
Phase Two: Initial Data Analysis
After collecting all of the data, I then began to analyze the data by following
protocols that I had established before the data were collected. As with data collection, I
did not stop analysis completely during this step; I took extensive notes and consulted
relevant literature in the field when appropriate. This phase in the data analysis was
separated according to the type of data gathered, for reasons explained below.
Initial Qualitative Analysis: Transcriptions and Initial Coding
I began my formal processing of the data by working with the qualitative
interview data. I did this first because I wanted to keep the qualitative and quantitative
methods separate at this point, and I felt that there was more danger of my qualitative
findings being influenced by the quantitative data than the reverse. At this point of my
analysis, I thus pay my respects to the two separate general assumptions about social
reality commonly associated with the qualitative and quantitative approaches. Because
quantitative research is often assumed to reflect a hard, external, and objective reality, it
stands to reason that that reality (reflected in my analysis of the survey data) will not
change, regardless of when I conduct that analysis. However, qualitative research is
based on interpretation of subjective meanings which individual place on their action; my
interpretation of this reality might change based on other factors (Cohen et al., 2000).
I began my analysis of the qualitative data by transcribing the 33 interviews. I
transcribed the interviews by playing the digital files and typing the words of the
115 participants, as well as my own questions, into a Word file. I did not use any
transcription software, due to personal preference. The transcripts included all words
said during the interviews, since I believe that even one-word responses in interviews
with early adolescents had the potential to be revealing.
As I transcribed these interviews, I used the “Comment” function in Word, which
allows an individual to highlight text and type comments in the margin of the document.
As I was transcribing, I allowed myself to identify “moments” in each transcript. This
concept of “moments” is informed by the work of Barritt, Beekman, Bleeker, and
Mulderij (1983). The “moments” are statements or passages that leapt out at me, that
“fly up like sparks,” to use Barritt et al.’s terminology (p. 6), as important to how students
are motivated or not to learn language. After identifying a moment, I attempted to
answer the question: “What does this moment show about how this student is motivated –
or not motivated - to learn language?” My response, written in my inserted comment,
beginning with “It shows…,” would try to reflect the participant’s meaning as faithfully
as possible. I would make no attempt, at this point of my analysis, to connect the
participants’ words explicitly to the ways that I know that other researchers have
constructed motivation, or even to pre-established themes.
Once I transcribed the 33 interviews, I printed them all out in paper copy,
including the comments that I had written reflecting what I saw as important moments. I
then created initial codes for themes associated with this study. These codes were both
deductive and inductive. The deductive codes were based on the components of language
learning motivation identified by Gardner (1985b, 2001a, 2001b), which had a
116 Table 3.6
Deductive Codes used in Initial Interview Coding, Relation to Survey Subscales
Deductive Interview Code (based on Gardner
1985b, 2001b)
Corresponding Survey Subscale(s) in
Modified AMTB
Target language use anxiety in class
Target language use anxiety outside of class
Target language use anxiety (negatively-
worded items)
Evaluation of target language course (none)
Attitudes about the people who speak the
target language
Attitudes about the people who speak
the target language
Instrumental orientation Instrumental orientation
Integrative orientation Integrative orientation
Parental encouragementa Parental encouragement
Evaluation of target language teacher (none)
Interest in world languages Interest in world languages
Attitudes about learning language
(positively-worded items)
Attitudes about learning language
Attitudes about learning language
(negatively-worded items)
a Not included in Gardner 2001b.
relationship with the socio-educational model (see Table 3.6). Because of the different
versions of the AMTB and the adaptations that I had made, not all of these deductive
codes had corresponding subscales in the version of the AMTB that I gave the students to
117 complete. Because these codes were linked to concepts in the field, I generally
considered them interpretive rather than descriptive codes.
I arrived at an initial list of inductive codes stemming from two major sources.
The first source was the informal notes that I had taken during the interviews. Those
notes guided me in identifying themes that were related to the students’ language learning
motivation. The second source was the comments that I had written during the
transcription process. There was a substantial amount of overlap between the two
sources. Most of these codes were interpretive, meaning that they referred to what I
thought that the students meant “backstage,” rather than a very literal, descriptive code of
what they actually said (Miles & Huberman, 1994). For instance, if a student said that
s/he wanted to learn a language because s/he heard that it made him/her smarter, I coded
it as “brain,” because it was a motivational factor that reflected the research on brain
development associated with immersion education. Some of these codes had master
codes (for example, “use,” indicating using the target language in special situations) as
well as subcodes that all fit the same master code (for example, “use-code,” using the
target language as a code with an interlocutor) (Miles & Huberman, 1994). This list of
inductive codes developed and changed as I coded the interviews this first time.
To code the interviews, I highlighted words, phrases, or passages, what I call
chunks, which I felt corresponded with a particular code, whether deductive or inductive.
I then wrote the code on the paper next to the marked chunk. Many chunks had two or
three different codes associated with them, particularly in this first iteration. I chose not
to use coding software because of my desire to avoid an overemphasis on the frequency
118 of responses (Miles & Huberman, 1994). I also wished to focus on the intensity with
which the various themes associated with codes were mentioned by the students. Once I
had read through all of the interviews, identified a list of deductive and inductive codes,
and marked all of the interview transcripts, I moved on to the next step in my initial
analysis.
Initial Quantitative Analysis: Statistical Analyses
The quantitative analysis involved several statistical calculations based on the
results from the student and parent surveys. I used the statistical software SPSS for all
calculations.
First, I considered Part One of the student survey (Appendix G), adapted from the
Attitude/Motivation Test Battery and composed entirely of Likert-scale questions. The
use of Likert-type scales to measure opinions, beliefs, and attitudes is well-documented in
the behavioral sciences and in L2 research specifically (Busch, 1993). The popularity of
the AMTB and its adaptations is certainly evidence of this. However, using Likert-scale
questions in statistical analysis can be problematic, since they yield ordinal data and
programs like SPSS assume interval data. Researchers seeking to use Likert-scale
questions have been advised to treat the data carefully, particularly if they wish to do
parametric analyses like t tests, correlations, and Analyses of Variance (ANOVAs). I
have responded to this in several ways in the construction of my quantitative analysis.
By converting the Likert-scale items (entering -2 for a “strongly disagree” response, -1
for a “disagree” response, 0 for a “neutral” response,” +1 for an “agree” response, and +2
for a “strongly agree” response), I created a coarse interval scale or what Turner (1993)
119 has called “interval-like data” for the responses to this portion of the student survey
(1993, p. 738). In order to see if these results were somewhat normally distributed, I
generated a table of descriptive statistics of the measures (including the alpha, mean,
standard deviation, range, and skewness). Due to the nature of the data, these statistics
were only used to show how the results were distributed for each subscale, so that I could
verify that they were all somewhat normally distributed.14 Since the data for every
subscale approached a normal distribution, assumptions regarding the nature of the data
were met to do some parametric analyses.
I then tested the internal consistency of the eight subscales of the survey by
calculating Cronbach’s alpha for each one, and all were strong enough to indicate that the
subscales were internally consistent. Finally, I calculated Pearson’s correlation among the
eight subscales to see how they correlated with one another. These are reported as
appropriate in Chapters Four and Five.
In prior research addressing the socio-educational model using the data provided
by the AMTB, there have been several accepted types of analysis. As shown in Chapter
Two, the factors in L2 learning motivation indicated by the subscales on the AMTB are
grouped together under larger constructs within the socio-educational model, for instance,
14 Although there is some precedent for the use of group means to analyze subscales in the AMTB or its modified versions (see Taguchi et al., 2009; Worth, 2008), the nature of Likert-scale data and my judgment of the variability with which early adolescents can read and respond to phrases like “really disagree” or “sort of agree” encouraged me to be more conservative with the discussion of group means in this study, to the point of not including them at all. In my mini case studies, however, I have compared the mean of one student’s responses to questions in one subscale to the mean of his/her responses to questions in another subscale. In this, I assume that each student read the Likert scale categories somewhat consistently for all questions.
120 the subscales of “Integrative orientation,” “Interest in world languages,” and “Attitudes
toward the target community” have commonly been grouped together under the
overarching construct of integrativeness. Gardner pointed out in a 2001 article that some
studies have focused on aggregating scores to provide assessments of the five main
constructs of the model (like integrativeness). Other studies have focused on the scores
on the individual subscales. Gardner suggested that the purpose of the study be the
driving force behind deciding which type of analysis to undertake (2001a). I chose to
focus on the scores of the individual subscales for two main reasons. First of all, doing
so allowed me to do a more detailed analysis of correlations with the home background
characteristics of the students; I was better able to see how each individual subscale was
affected by different ways that the students could be grouped. Second, a major purpose
of this study was to use qualitative methods to provide insight into the quantitative data
from the AMTB. The subscales were easier to address directly with specific questions
during the interviews, and as a result, they emerged more readily from the qualitative data
during coding, as I described above. Thus, for the purposes of my statistical analysis, I
have focused on the scores of the individual subscales.
After my analysis of the AMTB portion of the student survey, I then considered
the first section of the parent surveys (Appendix F), which addresses the home
background characteristics of the students. I first generated descriptive statistics of the
frequencies and percentages of the different responses on this part of the survey
(Appendix A). Beyond giving me an overview of the study participants, this allowed me
to see if any of the groups created by responses to any of these questions would be too
121 small to be meaningful in further analyses. If the responses were sufficiently large, I then
conducted t tests or one-way analyses of variance (ANOVAs) in order to identify
associations between the parent responses and the AMTB portion of the student surveys.
If the t test or ANOVA revealed a significant relationship between a given
subscale and a parent response, I calculated the effect size for that relationship using the
adjusted coefficient of determination (R2) statistic. This allowed me to identify the
percentage of the variance in the subscale responses that could be accounted for by the
home background characteristic that was the topic of that question. In other words, if
some students responded differently on a certain subscale when they had a certain home
background characteristic, the effect size helped to explain the extent to which that
characteristic seemed to affect their responses. I also calculated the standard deviation of
difference between at least two means of the groups in order to further be able to
illustrate the extent of the differences between groups. Due to the issues involving the
ordinal nature of Likert-scale data, these effect sizes only entered into my analyses in
Chapters Four and Five when they represented a consistent trend in the data.
Additionally, I did the same calculations to see if the elementary immersion school
attended by the respondent had any effect on the subscale responses, and if there were
significant differences between the responses of the interviewees and the non-
interviewees.
My third stage of quantitative analysis involved the parallel proficiency sections
in the parent and student surveys (Part Two on both surveys). In order to measure the
extent to which the students and the parents agreed as to the proficiency of the student in
122 accomplishing different language tasks, I calculated the Cohen’s kappa coefficient, a
measurement of agreement, for each corresponding question on the parent and student
surveys.
Phase Three: Second Iteration of Qualitative Theme Analysis
After completing the statistical analyses, I then returned to the interview
transcripts and codes in order to further develop and verify the initial codes and themes.
This iteration served several purposes. First of all, through this second examination of
the transcripts, I sought to bring the analysis beyond a surface content analysis to a level
of theory development (Anfara Jr., Brown, & Mangione, 2002). Even though the initial
coding was interpretive and not merely descriptive, it was still a first pass at the coding,
and it contained definitional errors and inconsistencies that only emerged as I reflected on
my findings from both the qualitative and quantitative approaches. For example, I
realized at this point that I had been defining “integrative orientation” too narrowly, given
the definitions in the field and the types of questions that I had been asking on the
surveys. As such, I used this opportunity to create “consistent and refined definitions” in
my coding of the interviews (Rubin & Rubin, 2005, p. 216).
The second purpose served by this iteration of coding was to increase the
credibility of my qualitative findings. I use the term “credibility” here to parallel the term
“validity” in most positivistic research, since that term usually is connected with the
principle of generalizability, which is not an aim of this part of the study (Cohen et al.,
2000; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). However, given the relative underdevelopment of
the principle of credibility in qualitative research, many of the techniques that I used to
123 make my study more credible were in fact borrowed from the methodology of
quantitative research. First, by revisiting the interview transcripts and recoding them, I
verified that the codes that I had created truly reflected the content of the data. Although
I allowed myself to refer back to what I had previously coded, I also checked that those
codes actually reflected the participants’ statements. I modified and redefined some
codes to more accurately reflect the nature of the statements; and I combined and/or
eliminated codes that seemed to have little support in the transcripts (Rubin & Rubin,
2005).
Secondly, I asked two fellow graduate students to code selected transcripts as
well. As such, I asked them to “check-code” my data (Miles & Huberman 2004, p. 64),
also referred to as a “peer audit” (Anfara Jr., Brown, & Mangione, 2002). I asked them
to read through the transcripts and identify things that they thought should be coded for a
data analysis, according to my first research question. I gave them each five transcripts
that I selected via stratified sampling so as to make sure that a variety of schools, genders,
and continuing/non-continuing characteristics were represented. I encouraged them to
consider each transcript individually, inductively considering them for things that seemed
to them to be language learning motivational factors. I instructed them to label the
chunks of text that they thought were important in light of my question, and to explain
briefly why they thought it was. When they returned the coded transcripts, I read their
notes and examined them side-by-side with my own codes to see if there were any major
discrepancies or changes to make.
124 I then took the paper transcripts, marked with the updated codes, and created a
table in Word. The first column of this table was for the code associated with the data
chunk. The second column contained the chunk copied-and-pasted from the text of the
transcript, marked with the respondent’s identifier as well as the page of the transcript
where the chunk could be found. The third column included my own comments at this
point of the analysis process. Sometimes, I took these comments from what I had written
during transcription, but more often, I wrote new comments based on the analysis that
had taken place since that initial step. If a chunk was associated with two different codes,
I entered it into the table twice, once for each code. Once I had gone through this process
with all of the transcripts, I sorted the table in order to put all of the identically coded
chunks together.
My final act in working solely with the qualitative data was to examine the sorted
chunks and write some pages of analysis for each code. This informal writing allowed
me to process all of the similarly coded chunks together for the first time. I made an
effort to connect each code with the literature in the field. As a result, I was able to see
which codes seemed to correspond to things that could be called themes, which ones had
some relationship to the literature in the field, and which ones were perhaps too
impoverished to be worth pursuing.
Phase Four: Exploration of Integrated Findings
The next step in my data analysis was an integrated consideration of the
qualitative and quantitative findings. This step in the analysis was also the first stage at
which quantitative and qualitative approaches were integrated in my study, beyond the
125 fact that I collected both quantitative and qualitative data. Although two different
participant groups were involved when considering the quantitative and qualitative data
(the group of 131 survey respondents, and the subset of 33 students who also participated
in the interviews), a t-test of the two groups revealed that there were no significant
differences between the groups in their AMTB responses. I thus felt confident that the
two groups were sufficiently similar to consider in an integrated way.
At this point, I reviewed and reconsidered the themes that emerged in the
qualitative analysis side-by-side with the findings from the statistical analyses. In doing
this, I also considered the literature in the fields of both learning motivation research and
immersion education research. This led me to understand how to refine, combine, and
organize the presentation of my findings. I made an effort not just to focus on areas
where the two data sources were congruent; I also looked at areas where one data source
revealed an important finding that was not there in the other source. This hearkens back
to my dialectic philosophy of mixed methods research, where the opposing viewpoints of
different methods and their interaction can create tension and be revealing in their own
ways (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003).
Phase Five: Mini Case Studies
My final phase of data analysis involved selecting some of the student participants
for a deep analysis, that is, a close investigation into their particular case across all forms
of data that I collected from and about them. I call these “mini case studies.” In looking
at the data in this fashion, I wished to have some space in the study to minimize the
choreography and manipulation that is inevitable when so much data are involved. I feel
126 that the identification of content themes in the interviews and the pairing of that
information with the survey results is very important. However, such an approach also
risks losing the individual voices of students and their stories in favor of the voice of the
collective. Some students expressed ideas and thoughts that were unique, and I feel that
it is important to listen to their voices as well. Doing so has the potential to allow
unexpected insights to emerge (Daniels & Araposthatis, 2005). I believe that the
inclusion of this type of data analysis procedure also helped me to illustrate how L2
learning motivation might work for an individual student, in a way that a more theme-
centered analysis across many students would not be able to do (Connelly & Clandinin,
1990).
I selected specific students based on their representativeness of important new,
contradictory, or exemplary ideas related to L2 learning motivation. I then traced any
connections or contradictions that I saw for each student across my various data sources.
I focused on how the student responded to the survey questions and the interview
questions, identifying where there might be important insights about the nature of L2
learning motivation as reflected in different types of data. Furthermore, I took into
consideration the responses from the parent of each student about the students’ home
background characteristics, as well as the parent’s responses to the open-ended questions
about their choices involving immersion education.
127
CHAPTER FOUR: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION:
PERSISTENCE AND ATTRITION IN IMMERSION PROGRAMS
Introduction
This chapter provides important insights into the research questions for this study.
RQ1: What contributes to the second language (L2) learning motivation of
elementary immersion program graduates? How do these motivating factors
interrelate?
I address this question in this chapter through addressing selected motivating
factors that relate to the chapter’s topic: persistence and attrition in immersion education.
Those motivating factors, identified deductively using the socio-educational model and
inductively through a theme analysis of the qualitative data, include: attitudes about
immersion language learning, anxiety and its complexities, influence of parental and peer
relationships, and attitudes toward the learning situation. The case studies at the
beginning of the chapter provide an initial introduction to these relevant motivating
factors and give an illustration of how these motivating factors can interrelate for
individual students. The statistical correlations among the factors are referenced when
possible in order to address how they interrelate. Relationships between motivating
factors in the qualitative data are traced through the ideas and connections articulated by
the students themselves.
RQ2: What does an examination of the L2 learning motivation of early adolescent
immersion graduates reveal about important issues in immersion education, such as: (a)
128 Issues about persistence in and attrition from immersion programs?
I selected the students for the two case studies that kick off this chapter
specifically based on their representativeness of ideas related to persistence and attrition
in immersion education. In the next section of the chapter devoted to investigating
motivational factors, I selected factors in the socio-educational model and further themes
that emerged through the interviews that would be particularly useful in addressing the
issue of persistence and attrition in immersion education. For each factor, I explain how
prior research and/or the nature of the data connects it to the issue of persistence and
attrition. Next, I discuss the quantitative and qualitative results related to each factor in
order to examine how the motivating factor might also be a factor in students’ desire to
continue or leave an immersion program.
RQ3: In what ways do the data collected through student interviews provide
insight into the data generated by the results of the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery?
I address this question throughout this chapter by holding the quantitative and
qualitative results constantly in comparison. The presentation of the case studies
integrates the data from the two sources by using it to create a rich and detailed
description of the student (Merriam, 1998). Then, for each motivating factor discussed in
the chapter, I begin by presenting the quantitative results. I offer possible interpretations
for those results without considering the qualitative data. When I introduce the
qualitative data, I examine how it can offer insight into the interpretation of the
quantitative results. Additionally, I allow the qualitative data to lead to new paths of
inquiry about the motivating factor or related concepts, and I examine how those new
129 paths can be used to more adequately investigate the language learning motivation of the
students in the context of this study.
Two Case Studies
To introduce the two discussion chapters, I have chosen some case studies of
individual students that can illustrate important aspects of the chapter’s topic, in this case,
language learning motivation as it relates to persistence and attrition in immersion
education. As such, these are interpretive case studies, with the purpose to “illustrate,
support, or challenge theoretical assumptions held prior to the data gathering” (Merriam,
1998, p. 38). In these case studies, I attempt to address the assumptions in the socio-
educational model that relate to the specific topical framework, combining all data
sources to give a rich description of the selected students. Thus, I include data from their
home background characteristics and parent survey responses, their answers on their
student surveys, and their interviews. As already mentioned, I have chosen students for
these mini case studies based on their representativeness of important new, contradictory,
or exemplary ideas related to L2 learning motivation. This portion of my analysis will
furthermore help individual student experiences and voices emerge and provide a
backdrop for the rest of my analysis.
Case Study 1: Carlos*
Carlos was a continuing Spanish immersion student from urban School A. When
I first met him, he struck me as a cooperative and friendly student who was easy to
connect with. As with many students in this study, I met him at his homeroom class, and
* All of the case study students have been given pseudonyms.
130 he had clearly forgotten that we were going to meet; he came out of the room clutching a
deck of cards like he might have been getting ready to play a game with his friends. We
chatted comfortably about some of his weekend activities as we walked to the part of the
school where I was going to conduct the interview.
Because of a response in one of the open-ended parent survey questions, I knew
that Carlos identified as half Hispanic. Note that School A had the highest percentage of
Hispanic students in its population: over 45%. One obvious question, then, was what role
that might have played in Carlos’ participation and continuation in the immersion
program, and if he had any comments about his heritage or his fellow students’ heritage
in relation to his Spanish immersion program. From other responses on the parent
survey, I actually found that Carlos’ own background actually featured very little
exposure to the Spanish language and cultures; he had never traveled outside of the
United States, and he was raised in a completely monolingual English environment. He
did have some understanding of the complexity of the Spanish language, as he conveyed
in statements about elementary immersion school like, “You know the basic words but
you don’t know like other words like they would say in Mexico,” but then he also made
statements like, “French is almost an English and Spanish kind of mixed.” Thus, despite
Carlos’ Hispanic heritage, based on this evidence, I actually felt that he was largely
monoculturally American and English-dominant.
Carlos presented an interesting situation to the study of the topic of persistence
and attrition in immersion programs. As his parent explained in the open-ended parent
survey responses:
131
I didn’t have him continue immersion at first because I wanted him to make sure
he understood English as well as Spanish cause [sic] I had some concerns in
elementary school. He struggled at times in elementary but this second half of the
semester I decided to give him another chance.
Thus, Carlos actually, at the urging of his parent or parents, initially did not continue with
the immersion track in the junior high school continuation program from School A. He
did attend the same junior high school that housed the continuation program, but simply
joined the English track instead. However, through negotiation with his parent/parents,
he switched to the immersion track during the second semester of his seventh grade year.
I spoke with him in the spring of that year, so he had been back in the immersion track
for a few months at that point. He explained his side of the situation in the interview with
me:
I wanted to go [to the immersion continuation program] because I had a lot of
friends…but my mom said that I’m going to try to do the English because I didn’t
really do so good in Spanish…my mom wanted to see how I could do in
English…I was using a lot of Spanish but I was talking to my friends too much
and wasn’t necessarily doing all my work…I tried to get my mom to let me…go
to the immersion team if I could get good grades and if I promised that I’ll do
good enough to stay with my grades doing good. And so I tried that, and I’m
doing pretty good now. It’s starting to work out.
Although Carlos clearly agreed to leave the immersion track in favor of his mother’s
wishes and due to academic concerns, he eventually convinced her to allow him to
132 continue with immersion. Here, we can certainly see how the factor from the socio-
educational model pertaining to parental influence can affect students’ decisions to
continue or not. However, it is also clear that parental influence was not unidirectional in
the case of Carlos; he eventually negotiated his way to a different conclusion than his
parents had originally recommended.
It was clear that the social aspects of learning in the immersion program were
very important to Carlos, even though they perhaps did not always help him to succeed
academically. When I asked him what he might say to convince another student to
continue, Carlos stated, “I would tell them that we have a lot of friends that are on the
immersion team, a lot of friends that speak Spanish. If you leave the immersion team like
from my experience, you don’t get friends like you did before.” As happens with many
students in early adolescence (Stevenson, 1998; Bandura, 1997), his ability or desire to
balance his schoolwork and his social habits in class was being called into question, and
his mother originally intended from his separation from immersion to be a solution to this
problem. Carlos himself did confess that he was sometimes self-conscious about his
abilities in Spanish (“I felt like everybody else in kindergarten could understand the
teacher more”), but then countered those statements with reasoned insights (“Later in first
grade a lot of people would ask me questions about words and I felt like I wasn’t the only
one who didn’t understand”). Carlos here showed an interesting side to his language
anxiety; Bandura (1997) has linked this type of sensitivity of relative standing with peers
as a type of “comparative efficacy appraisal and verification” that commonly occurs
during early adolescence (p. 173). Furthermore, this particular part of the conversation
133 shows how language anxiety fluctuated in Carlos without ultimately connecting to his
decision to leave and then rejoin the program. Instead, again, it seemed that it was an
issue of his managing his social life acceptably in balance with his academic life.
Carlos thus provides us with a case study of a student who enjoyed immersion
education not for purely pedagogical reasons like an enjoyment of the language or the
school environment. He was someone who truly thrived on the social environment, so
much so that he negotiated with his parents to return to the immersion track after one
semester gone from it. Academic issues were at the heart of his mother’s decision to
have him leave the immersion program, but they did not seem to mean much to him
beyond his agreement to pay more attention to them to appease his mother. Carlos’
Hispanic heritage was a minor motivating factor in his consideration of his immersion
school experience; although it may have afforded him more connection in some ways, it
had little relationship with his desire to persist in the program.
Case Study 2: AnneMarie
AnneMarie was a non-continuing French student from School B, which was
located in the same public school district as Carlos’ school. The immersion programs
from Schools A and B both continued in the same junior high school, albeit in separate
language-designated strands. AnneMarie had left the public school district to attend a
small Montessori charter school for her seventh-grade year. When she and I met for our
interview in a coffeeshop near her new school on a Friday afternoon, I found AnneMarie
to be an engaging and enthusiastic interviewee. From the stories that she chose to tell me
134 and from her general demeanor, she struck me as a socially successful student who liked
adults but was not afraid to question them.
Although AnneMarie’s parents were well-traveled outside of the United States
(the parent survey respondent had traveled 4-10 times outside of the U.S.), AnneMarie
herself had never had the chance to leave the country beyond a trip to Canada, nor were
any languages other than English spoken in her home. However, at the time of our
interview, due to having a younger sibling still attending School B, AnneMarie had a
French teaching intern from the school living with her family. The family had hosted
these interns before, as well. So, due in part to this, and I imagine also due to her chatty
and open nature, AnneMarie was able to reflect on some of the cultural differences
between Americans and French-speaking (particularly those from France) people, unlike
many other students whom I interviewed. She was unafraid of saying that her father
found the French “really mean” during a trip to France, or that she sometimes found the
French “snobby.” However, she was also able to deconstruct these thoughts, too; after
telling a story about how one intern’s father visited and found a friend’s house
unacceptably dirty, she said, “He probably thought about how to clean a house differently
than we did. We learned stuff like that [in school], just general ways of living in different
cultures.” I found AnneMarie to be clearly fascinated by cultural differences and
interested in the French language and culture, despite having relatively little exposure to
travel experiences.
135
AnneMarie left the immersion track for one primary reason: because of the size of
the school that housed the immersion continuation program. In her response to my
question about why she chose not to continue in immersion, she said:
The program that our school continues in, I didn’t want to go to that junior high
because it’s really huge, it’s really really really big. I think it had more to do with
the school that I was going to next instead of continuing with French.
Her parents seconded this response with their answer to the open-ended question on the
parent survey, although they seemed to indicate that the issue was bigger than just school
size:
We compared the immersion school opportunities with other schools’
opportunities, and liked another school better. We were looking for the best
school to help our daughter grow at her current stage of development, and based
the choice on that.
The parents expanded their response beyond the “size” issue, instead focusing on the
“opportunities” provided by the continuation school. Nonetheless, there is a measure of
agreement between the parents and AnneMarie. Not all was harmonious, though:
AnneMarie did believe that her father wanted her to keep learning French, and “he liked
[School B] a lot.” Nevertheless, they largely agreed that a change was a good idea. This
harmony between parents and the student contrasts with Carlos’ situation. Furthermore,
it is important to remember that the immersion continuation programs for Schools A and
B are housed in the same junior high; Carlos never mentioned the issue of school size or
“opportunities” in his conversation with me.
136
There were some important similarities between Carlos and AnneMarie, however.
As with Carlos, the social factor emerges in AnneMarie’s situation, albeit in a different
direction:
There was about eight of us that go to [the Montessori school] right now. I’d say
it influenced me a little bit, at the time my best friends were going to [the
Montessori school] but I had other friends that were going to [the continuation
school] and other schools around. But I think the majority of my friends were
going to [the Montessori school] and I think it might have influenced me.
In AnneMarie’s case, the social influence encouraged her to leave the immersion
continuation program and to attend a specific school. Importantly, I did ask her later if
the friends variable were removed, if she would still have chosen to go to the Montessori
school, and she said, “Mmm, yeah. I would’ve, because it’s smaller.” She returned to the
size issue of the junior high housing the continuation program.
The fact that AnneMarie had left the program seemed to have very little
connection to her attitude about learning French, however. Even though she professed to
“hate grammar,” she had very strong positive responses on the subscales of the AMTB
related to “Attitude toward the Target Language;” for every single positive statement
relating to this subscale, she marked “really agree.” For every single negative statement
except one, she marked “really disagree.” In the interview, she repeatedly expressed
pride about the fact that she knew French (“Because people say, ‘Do you know any other
languages?’ and you can say ‘Yeah,’ you actually know it fluently, so it’s really fun”),
and concern about keeping up with her French (“My friends talk about how we don’t
137 want to lose it, because…[my friend’s older brother] feels like he doesn’t know French
any more after a few years of not using it”). She thought that being a student at School B
made her smarter, in that “you know that there are other languages…and you learn other
ways that people think about things.” She even professed a desire to someday have a
career where she would “speak a ton of languages.” She was connected to her teachers
(“We were always really really really like comfortable with our teachers”) and the
teaching interns from the target cultures (“I loved having them”). She told several very
evocative and amusing stories about using the French language as a code in front of
monolingual English family and friends, and about her opportunities to translate and
show off for other friends. The consistency of these responses during our interview
convinced me that what she had claimed was true: her decision to leave the program
really had little to do with French, or even with her experience in the elementary
immersion program.
Discussion
Carlos and AnneMarie provide an important introduction to the topical framework
of persistence and attrition in immersion programs because of the reasons why they made
the decisions that they did. Although they both freely shared complex and interesting
thoughts about the target languages and cultures, it seemed like those factors, though
closely related to the construct of motivation established by Gardner and his colleagues,
were not necessarily influential in how they chose whether or not to continue in the
immersion track. Moreover, they both portrayed the decision whether or not to continue
as a negotiation and a conversation with their parents, rather than a blind following of
138 parent directive or an adolescent insistence. Despite their different home and school
backgrounds, they both depended a great deal on social factors to make their decisions
about continuing in the immersion program. AnneMarie found the size of the school
housing of continuation program as the most important factor in her decision not to
continue, but it did not even enter into my conversation with Carlos. In the rest of this
chapter, I will investigate these themes further, focusing on the crossroads of motivation
research and the topical framework of persistence and attrition in immersion programs.
The four areas that I will investigate are: attitudes about immersion language learning,
anxiety and its complexities, the influence of parental and peer relationships, and
attitudes toward the learning situation.
Attitudes toward Learning the Language…in an Immersion Setting
AnneMarie’s positive attitude about learning the language, as evidenced in both
the quantitative and qualitative data, contrasted sharply with her decision to stop her
participation in the immersion program. But is she representative of other participants in
my study? As we saw in Chapter Two, Gardner (2005) considered students’ attitudes
toward learning the language to be one of three indicator variables that directly feeds into
motivation in the socio-educational model. Although the other two indicator variables,
motivational intensity and desire to learn the language, were not included in this study for
conceptual and logistical reasons outlined in Chapter Two, this variable was included in
the modified AMTB. Gardner explained the relationship between attitudes toward
learning the language and motivation by saying that “the motivated individual will enjoy
the task of learning the language. Such an individual will say that it is fun, a challenge,
139 Table 4.1
Questions on the Modified AMTB Corresponding with the “Attitudes toward Learning
the Language” Subscales
Positively-Worded
I really enjoy learning [target language].
I plan to learn [target language] for as long as possible.
Learning [target language] is really great.
I love learning [target language].
Negatively-Worded
I would rather spend my time on subjects other than [target language].
I hate the [target] language.
When I leave high school, I’m not going to study [target language] any more.
Learning [target language] is a waste of time.
Note. Questions adapted from Gardner (1985a).
and enjoyable, even though at times enthusiasm may be less than at other times”
(Gardner, 2001, p. 10, emphasis his). This definition characterized attitudes toward
learning the language as a more or less fixed factor that may only vary in the intensity of
the enthusiasm associated with it, and of course had little to say about persistence in an
area of study. In this section, I will not only look at how the measurement of attitudes
toward learning the language performed in the quantitative data, but I will also look at
how the students spoke about these attitudes in their own words, and see how well that
matches up with the theoretical frameworks that I have identified as important to this
study, particularly attribution theory, as well as the notion of investment and the L2
140 Motivational Self System. Finally, I will see if these attitudes, as in the case of
AnneMarie, did customarily function relatively independently of students’ desires to
continue in the immersion track.
Survey Responses: Unexpected Attitudes, Revealing Trends
Students’ attitudes toward learning the language were measured using two
different sets of questions, one positively worded, one negatively worded, and thus two
corresponding subscales. Table 4.1 displays the questions featured in the adapted AMTB
used in this study. Student responses on both of these subscales were significantly
internally consistent in the 131 surveys returned, with a Cronbach’s alpha of .867 for the
positive subscale and .786 for the negative subscale. These two scales correlated
significantly with the other subscales in the study.
Table 4.2 summarizes the effect sizes of and differences among selected student
characteristics on the subscale responses. As explained in Chapter Two, computing
effect sizes allows us to see trends in how different student characteristics (for instance,
French versus Spanish students) might have an effect on the students’ responses in the
subscales through accounting for the variance in the subscales. I have also provided the
standard deviations between the different characteristic groups as additional illustration
of the extent of the difference. For instance, if one considers the first row, it is shown
that approximately 4.6 percent of the variation in students’ responses to the “Attitudes
toward learning the language” positively-worded subscale could be attributed to whether
or not they spoke another language in the home. Students who spoke another language in
141 Table 4.2
Effect Sizes of and Standard Deviation Differences among Select Student Attributes on
“Attitudes toward Learning the Language” Subscales
Home background
characteristic
Positively-worded statements Negatively-worded statements
Languages spoken in the home other than English
4.6% effect size “other” .5 SD > “English”
Ns
Parent fluency in the target language
2.6% effect size “other” .33 SD > “none/novice”
2.9% effect size “other” .33 SD < “none/novice”
Continuation in the immersion track
2.4% effect size “non-continuing” .5 SD > “continuing”
Ns
Gender 6.3% effect size “female” .5 SD > “male”
4.3% effect size “female” .5 SD < “male”
School location 5.7% effect size “urban” .66 SD > “suburban”
7.9% effect size “urban” .75 SD < “suburban”
Target language 3.4% effect size Spanish .33 SD > French
6.1% effect size Spanish .66 SD < French
School attended (multiple)
9.2% effect size School B 1 SD > School C
12.6% effect size School A 1 SD < School C
ns=not significant
the home (“other”) gave answers that were about one-half of a standard deviation more
positive than those who spoke only English at home.
Table 4.2 provides clear evidence that some student characteristics can account
for the variance in the students’ attitudes toward learning the language, as measured by
the subscales in the modified AMTB. First of all, students who had more exposure to
142 other languages in the home, through either other languages spoken in the home or
through parents who spoke the target language, were likely to be more positive in their
attitudes toward learning a language. Secondly, students who had decided not to
continue in the immersion track were, perhaps surprisingly, slightly more likely to be
positive about learning the target language than those who continued. This statistic must
be qualified by the fact that it stands somewhat alone in the results; similar divisions
between non-continuing and continuing students were not observable for any other
subscale. However, it certainly challenges any assumption that students who leave the
immersion track have a negative feeling about the language or language learning.
Finally, the characteristics of the student’s particular immersion school were sometimes
reflected in their responses to the survey questions about their attitudes toward learning a
language; if a school was in an urban setting, or a Spanish school, they were more likely
to respond positively about their attitudes toward learning a language. As such, students
from School C, which was a French school located in a suburban setting, did not respond
as positively as students from other schools.
As these results are considered, one must also take into account that several of the
listed student characteristics are interrelated. It is very possible that there is overlap, or
interaction, between the groups of students who live in homes where languages are
spoken other than English, and students whose parents display some sort of fluency in the
target language. More of an overlap clearly exists between the various school groupings.
Nevertheless, the fact that consistent effects of different groupings show up in these
143 subscales and not in all other subscales attests to the fact that there is a pattern in these
statistics that is worth pursuing.
These two related subscales and their relationship to immersion students’
persistence in their immersion programs, however, is clearly ambiguous. First of all, we
must consider the fact that students who did not continue in the immersion track were
slightly more positive about learning a language than those who did continue.
Furthermore, School C, which, according to the results presented here, would be most
likely to contain students with less positive attitudes toward learning a language, had the
highest percent of 2007 graduates in the district immersion continuation program (89%),
versus schools whose students scored one standard deviation higher on the positive scale
(School B; 42.8% of population continuing) or one standard deviation lower on the
negative scale (School A; 57.3% of population continuing). According to the statistical
data, therefore, a link between the socio-educational model’s definition of student
attitudes toward learning a language and persistence in an immersion program is
extremely tenuous. We have already seen this supported by AnneMarie’s case study;
perhaps listening to other student voices would shed more light on this relationship.
Defining Immersion Language Learning
The way you learned Spanish, you got tests and worksheets and you learn and the
teacher was Spanish, and he wrote stuff on the board. At French immersion, we
tried to speak French all of the time, it was just like French French French. The
French immersion really emerged in the language and in Spanish, you learn
144
through writing stuff down. [Non-continuing male from School B (French,
urban)]
Because in immersion education, language is not the topic of study per se, the
immersion graduates’ definition of “language learning” was sometimes much more
complex than the statements associated with the modified AMTB would indicate. The
quote above encapsulates what I saw as an important dichotomy in how the immersion
graduates explained the process of learning a language and their reactions to it: it was
either something that “emerged” out of confusion and with very little effort, or something
that required rote memorization and drill. For instance, a continuing male from School C
(French, suburban) said:
It’s just like I’ve developed the language over a period of time so it’s not like I
can say, ‘This year I learned half the language.’ But I think just the whole
[experience] since kindergarten has just been a learning experience all the way up
to now, and I’m still learning.
When I asked a continuing female from School A (Spanish, urban) how she was able to
understand what a teacher was saying, she said, “They just didn’t stop speaking Spanish,
the teacher just kept speaking it, so I had to [understand].” A non-continuing female
student from School E (Spanish, suburban) said, “They gave us simple words and then
they just started talking with us in Spanish, and then we would say stuff back. Then if
they’d ask us questions, then we’d be like, ‘Oh um, we said that before, oh um, how are
you doing?’… ‘Oh um, I’m doing good, yay!’” Language learning was frequently
characterized as a mysterious process that resulted in ease of comprehension and
145 expression. When students spoke about language learning in this way, it was often
depicted as a pleasurable experience. As we can see from the quotes above, both
continuing and non-continuing students characterized their learning like this.
The immersion graduates rarely mentioned the idea that the curriculum was
structured around an integration of language and content; when they did mention it, the
students often identified content mastery in opposition to language learning. Although
one continuing male student from School C (French, suburban) did like the fact that you
learned something “twice” when you learned content in a different language, he was the
rare exception. Several non-continuing students explained that they were struggling with
the transition from taking content courses in the target language to English in their new
educational settings. As one non-continuing female from School D (Spanish, suburban)
said, “Since I learned everything in Spanish including math, now that I’m in an English
school it’s a bit hard…so I have to put terms together.” Continuing students also
described their struggles with developing content knowledge only in the target language.
A continuing male from School A (Spanish, urban) said:
If I were to work as a teacher I would have to work as an immersion math
teacher… “Median” or “average,” I don’t understand what that means in English,
but in Spanish if you were to tell me the word I would understand what it means.
But so, somebody in English asks what’s the median of 24…I would say I don’t
know, and I’d look kind of stupid.
Another continuing male, from School E (Spanish, suburban), mentioned the fact that the
standardized tests used to evaluate the students and their districts were in English, and
146 that for a student who had taken content classes in a different language, that could be a
challenge. Some students thus recognized a connection between learning language and
learning content, yet they seemed to disregard the integration of content and language to
the point of considering it as more of an opposition to rather than a complement of
helping them to learn.
Yet another way that students described language learning was as traditional
concepts of memorization and drill and grammar. Like AnneMarie, both continuing and
non-continuing immersion graduates said that grammar was their least favorite part of
language learning, although some students did profess an interest in and a passion for
grammar. The frequency with which grammar was mentioned was matched by the
intensity of the disapprobation expressed by the students. A non-continuing male student
from School B (urban, French), stated, “I didn’t really like doing all the writing stuff, the
grammar and like all that stuff, because it was just…hard, but I tolerated it because
French is a cool language.” Another non-continuing student declared that “repeating it
over and over again, it was really boring” (female, non-continuing, from urban Spanish
School A). The confusion of how to select different verb tenses and obey grammar rules
was mentioned by students who were still in the program as well, saying “sometimes I
get frustrated,” (continuing female from suburban, Spanish School D), or “it’s so
complicated,” (continuing male from suburban, Spanish School D), or “it’s harder than
English” (continuing female from urban, French School B). Other continuing students
identified the same parts of the language as things that they really liked about it: a
continuing female from School D (suburban, Spanish) said, “I like how there are so many
147 ways to speak Spanish…like there are so many verbs and…ways to say the verbs
and…like there’s imperfect verbs and then there’s perfect verbs, and there’s so many
other ones.” Again, we can see that the students did not identify the integration of
content and language learning as how language is learned in immersion education.
A third way that students described language learning was as a function of the
interplay between English and target language use in the classroom. Interestingly, as
with the focus on grammar rather than content learning, the students’ statements often
seemed to reflect pedagogical practices that are not normally recommended in immersion
education. For example, a continuing male from School A (Spanish, urban) said that his
favorite teacher “sometimes talked in English to me even though we were in Spanish
class. She’d speak English to me, and she would be calm…because some kids here don’t
like speaking Spanish.” His evaluation of his favorite teacher clearly stemmed in part
from her choice to use English even when Spanish was the designated language of
instruction at that time. However, this teacher went against one of the defining
characteristics of immersion education: that immersion teachers clearly separate the use
of one language versus another for sustained periods of time (Fortune & Tedick, 2008).
Another example was a continuing female from School C (French, suburban) who
testified that, in some classes, “you get in a lot of trouble for speaking in English.”
Students “getting in trouble” for speaking English in a one-way immersion program goes
against a foundational principle of immersion education, the idea of additive
bilingualism. Although any sanction against the use of the L1 has arguably more
problematic implications in situations where the student’s L1 is the minority language in
148 society, the benefits of additive bilingualism like creating a supportive learning
environment and taking advantage of linguistic transfer still exist in one-way contexts
(Genesee, 2008). Finally, in yet another case, a continuing male student from French,
urban School B testified that the teachers “[said] that to understand [in the immersion
continuation program], we have to speak in English.” The bad practice implicated with
this statement is obvious.
Although the students above often associated their thoughts about language
learning with their memories of success or failure in learning, the positive and negative
comments about language learning were divided fairly evenly between the continuing
and non-continuing students. This, in combination with the statistical evidence
summarized above, suggests that what Norton (2000a) has called the “multiple desires”
of the learner are at play: that students could still be intrigued and inspired by the process
of learning language, but still want to leave the program; that they could still be frustrated
by the banalities of grammar work or by the challenges of mastering content in another
language, but still want to continue as immersion language learners. Thus, a disconnect
clearly exists in the qualitative data between students’ attitudes toward learning a
language and their eventual decisions about whether or not to persist in the immersion
program. AnneMarie’s case thus is emblematic of what many students have experienced
facing the choice of continuation or not. In order to understand this disconnect more
thoroughly, one must examine the patterns of thinking and belief that underlie the
students’ expressed opinions about L2 learning.
149
Patterns of Thinking and Belief about Immersion Language Learning
Student: If you don’t really like French and you don’t get into it much, you
wouldn’t really like [learning a language]. But if you get into it a lot, like you
talk with your friends in French or just play games in French, you’ll probably like
it.
Interviewer: Ok, what kind of people usually like French, or get into it?
Student: The ones who get As in all of the classes. (non-continuing male from
French, suburban School C)
I was interested to find that many students further defined their attitudes about
language learning when I asked them not about their own experiences or positive or
negative feelings about language learning, but rather when I asked them about how others
might react to it. This included asking them how their fellow students felt about learning
language, and, later in the interview, who should and should not learn language. In the
interview above, perhaps the student was not comfortable saying that he felt successful or
unsuccessful in learning French during our interview, but he was able to reveal to me the
patterns of his belief about language learning through talking about other students. By
being able to distance themselves slightly from their personal experiences with learning
language, the students seemed more at ease with identifying some of their foundational
beliefs about learning a language. This part of my analysis thus connects more with
attribution theory and the work by Ushioda (1994), who has argued that motivation in L2
learning is primarily an issue of patterns of thinking and belief. The students’ beliefs
about language learning can be connected to their motivation in accordance with
150 attribution theory: we can see what they identify as the causes for successful and
unsuccessful language learning, and address whether or not that connects with their own
motivation and/or propensity to continue in immersion education. Only rarely did the
immersion graduates characterize learning a language as something that would be easy
for everyone.
Most students attributed success in language learning to either effort or skill on
the part of the student, rather than luck or generosity of teachers, as such typifying the
“successful” student according to the attribution theory of motivation (Covington, 1984).
Skill in the language was defined by some students as having the ability to be outgoing
(continuing female, French, suburban School C); avoid frustration (non-continuing male,
Spanish, urban School A); or comprehend things easily (non-continuing male from
Spanish, suburban School E). As for effort, one non-continuing male student from
School C (French, suburban) said, “If you don’t study a lot of the stuff…I don’t think
you’d do really well at that language. If you really put your mind to stuff, you could
probably do that language.” A continuing male from the urban French school, School B,
said that other students “…all say they hate learning French. I don’t understand why.
Probably because they just don’t want to work.” A corollary to this is what we saw in
AnneMarie’s case study, where she was concerned about losing the language; several
students readily admitted that “losing the language” or “throwing [six years of French]
away” (non-continuing female from School C – French, suburban) were major worries
about leaving the immersion program. I could not identify one immersion graduate who
151 seemed to think that language learning was a matter of luck or chance; they all knew that
it took effort and/or skill to achieve what they had done.
Conclusion
Looking at the immersion graduates’ attitudes about learning a language both
quantitatively and qualitatively has laid the groundwork for a further investigation into
persistence and attrition in immersion programs. Some surprising attitudes and revealing
trends were identified through the quantitative data about this variable, notably that
students who left the immersion programs were slightly more positive about learning a
language than those who continued. This directly contradicts the findings in some studies
in non-immersion (Bartley, 1970) and immersion (Bruck, 1985; Morton et al., 1999)
contexts, which linked poor attitudes with leaving FL programs; other studies (for
example, Campbell, 1992; Hayden 1988) have agreed that negative attitudes have little to
do with immersion students’ departures from the programs. Furthermore, students from
French and/or suburban schools were more likely to be negative about learning a
language than students who went to Spanish and/or urban schools; yet that did not
correspond with persistence and attrition rates in the corresponding schools.
There are several possibilities in explaining this statistic. One would simply be to
say that it is not a true reflection of how the student respondents really feel about
language learning. For instance, perhaps the students who had left the program wished to
respond positively in order to show that leaving the program did not mean that they were
not good language learners. Another possibility was that the non-continuing students
were looking back on their language learning experience with rose-colored glasses
152 because they missed the community of their elementary school. Another way to explain
this statistic is to look more closely at the qualitative data. Based on the students’
statements about the nature of language learning, it is possible that they simply had
profound misunderstandings about what language learning entailed. The students
struggled with defining language learning in general, perhaps because in the immersion
model, the focus is on content learning rather than language learning per se. Maybe,
therefore, they just did not understand the questions.
There is also the possibility, however, that the students’ attitudes toward language
learning really did not have anything to do with whether or not they wanted to continue in
immersion education. Some evidence of this lies in the fact that, when talking about
other students or individuals, both the continuing and the non-continuing students were
more able to express that they thought that successful language learning could be
attributed to skill and effort. According to the attribution theory, this indicates that most
of the immersion graduates, even those who had chosen not to continue with immersion
education in middle/junior high school, saw themselves as successful language learners.
Learners who felt more unsuccessful would be more likely to say that language learning
was based on chance or luck.
Research linking motivation to the attribution theory has allowed that learners,
when unsuccessful with learning, are able to “take control of their affective learning
experience” by attributing setbacks to shortcomings that can be overcome (Ushioda,
2001, pp. 120-121). Classroom-based language learning is thus only a part of how the
students envision themselves as L2 learners and communicators. Studies by Yashima
153 (2009) and Lamb (2009) framed by the L2 Motivational Self System have offered the
interpretation that students often disassociate the process of language learning from their
ideal L2 self, particularly as they become more proficient in the L2. A similar finding
from a 1982 study showed that students’ attitudes about L2 study were very different
from their attitudes about the target culture(s) (Muchnick & Wolfe, 1982). As Yashima
(2009) stated, when the language moves from being just another subject that must be
“tested and graded” to one that is used for communication, the students are more able to
envision their ideal L2 selves (2009, p. 153). Of course, in the case of immersion
students, there is a strong likelihood that they never saw L2 study as “just another
subject;” as such, the disconnect between their attitudes about learning a language and
their other opinions and decisions about L2 learning (such as whether or not to continue
with L2 study) is completely comprehensible. I would thus argue that the quantitative and
the qualitative data from this study support the idea, presented in AnneMarie’s case
study, that student attitudes toward learning a language did not necessarily have a strong
impact on their decision to persist in immersion education.
Anxiety and its Complexities
Language anxiety is defined situationally in the socio-educational model in one of
two contexts: the context of the language class, or contexts outside of the classroom
situation where the language might be used (Gardner, 2005). As with Gardner’s
definition of attitudes toward the learning situation, this can be problematic in the
immersion setting, since students do not necessarily have one language class, nor do they
always have access to a context outside of the classroom situation where the language
154 might be used. Although in the 2005 representation of the socio-educational model,
target language use anxiety was not theorized to have a direct relationship with
motivation (instead in an inverse relationship with achievement), other studies using the
AMTB as an instrument have linked anxiety and motivation in an inverse relationship
(see for instance Gardner, Masgoret, & Tremblay, 1999). The case study about Carlos
gave us an insight into how having target language use anxiety might fluctuate in an
immersion student with a long history of studying in the language, from feeling as if one
is the only student who does not understand in kindergarten, to feeling more confident
than other students in first grade. This supports Norton’s (2000a) characterization of
anxiety as something that is not an inherent trait of a learner, rather, it is “socially
constructed in and by the lived experience of learners” (2000a, p. 123). Furthermore,
Carlos’ case suggested that more insight could come from a consideration of some of
Bandura’s work in self-efficacy (1997), particularly with regard to how adolescents
assess and compare their own ability to complete tasks.
Students’ target language use anxiety is important with regard to the particular
topic area of persistence and attrition in immersion education. As we have seen, some
studies have connected concepts potentially related to language anxiety like being a
struggling learner (Arnett & Fortune, 2004; Bruck, 1985), self-concept (Bruck, 1985), or
self-confidence (Cadez, 2006) to attrition from immersion programs. I would also argue
that a great deal of anecdotal and folk wisdom in the community of parents, students,
teachers, and administrators of immersion programs has suggested that students with
language anxiety would struggle, and would no longer want to be in immersion when
155 Table 4.3
Questions on the Modified AMTB Corresponding with the “Target Language Use
Anxiety” Subscale
I always feel that the other students speak [target language] better than I do.
I get nervous and confused when I speak [target language].
I never feel quite sure of myself when I am speaking [target language].
In class, I get embarrassed answering questions in [target language].
I am afraid other students will laugh at me when I speak [target language].
Note. Questions adapted from Gardner (1985a).
offered a chance to leave. Thus, in this section, I investigate how language anxiety
relates to motivation, and how it relates to persistence in immersion education.
Hopefully, both of these relationships can be elucidated by investigating this area using
mixed methods.
Survey Responses: The Unpredictability of Immersion Graduate Anxiety
The “Target language use anxiety” subscale contained five negatively-worded
items on the adapted AMTB, as listed in Table 4.3. The responses to these statements
were significantly internally consistent in the 131 surveys returned, with a Cronbach’s
Alpha of .745. Although one has to be cautious about using means in the analysis of
Likert-scale questions, the mean response for this negatively-worded subscale was -1.04
for all corresponding Table 4.3 questions on all surveys, indicating that overall, the
respondents tended to disagree with the negative statements.
In many other ways, however, this subscale did not behave very predictably. First
of all, as Table 4.4 shows, the “Target language use anxiety” subscale did not correlate
156 Table 4.4
Pearson Correlation Coefficients of Modified AMTB Subscales with the “Target
Language Use Anxiety” Subscale
Subscale Coefficient
Attitudes toward People of the Target Culture (s) -.124a
Interest in World Languages -.131a
Attitudes toward Learning the Target Language
(positively-worded statements)
-.171a
Attitudes toward Learning the Target Language
(negatively-worded statements)
.354c
Integrative Orientation -.229b
Instrumental Orientation -.148a
Parental Encouragement -.004a
aNot significant bSignificant at the .05 level (2-tailed) cSignificant at the .01 level (2-tailed)
significantly with the majority of the other subscales used in the modified AMTB in this
study, even though all of the other subscales did correlate significantly with one another
to at least the .05 level. This means that the respondents’ target language use anxiety had
no real relationship at all with most of the other measures related to language learning
motivation, with the exception of integrative motivation and the negatively-worded
subscale measuring attitudes toward learning a language. This finding should not
necessarily be surprising, given the position of “Target language use anxiety” in the
socio-educational model as in an inverse relationship only with achievement and not
157 motivation. However, it does contradict some of the studies that have found that anxiety
is negatively correlated with motivation in language learning situations (Clément,
Dörnyei, & Noels, 1994; Ehrman, 1996) and support those that say that anxiety is largely
not a factor (Gardner, Day, & MacIntyre, 1992; Wesche et al., 1990).
The second point about the statistical analysis of this subscale is important to the
topical framework of persistence and attrition in immersion education. When examining
the relationships between the parent responses and the student responses, I found that
there were no significant effects of any home background characteristics on the subscale
“Target language use anxiety.” This included not just exposure to other languages and
cultures, but also issues related to the immersion program’s characteristics, and, most
importantly, whether or not the students were still in the immersion continuation
program. That is to say, the quantitative data did not reveal any difference in language
anxiety between the students who continued and those who did not continue in the
immersion program. This provides an interesting perspective when taken in tandem with
the statistical results about the students’ “Attitudes toward learning the language;” at this
point, it is difficult to say what, exactly, might affect immersion graduates’ persistence in
the program, given that neither of these areas differentiated whatsoever statistically
between students who continued with the immersion program and those who chose not to
continue. The ambiguities of these statistical results can perhaps be helped by some
insights from the student interviews.
158
The Realities of Immersion Graduate Anxiety: In the Classroom
Target language use anxiety certainly did exist for some immersion graduates, and
it often fell into the pattern suggested by Gardner in that it occurred both within the
classroom context and outside of that context. As part of my standard interview protocol,
I asked the students “Have you ever been nervous about communicating in (the target
language)?” thus hopefully allowing them to interpret the word “communicating”
however they would like. Some students immediately reflected on incidents or anxieties
that took place in the classroom context. Mirroring the statements on the AMTB,
moments when the students were encouraged to “perform,” like on tests or when
responding to a direct question, were frequently mentioned. During our interview,
AnneMarie said, “The only time I’ve really been nervous has been with something like a
grammar test, or especially if someone like the principal was observing the classroom and
I had to recite.” Another non-continuing female from the same school agreed, “If the
teachers were asking a question, sometimes I’d be nervous, like if I didn’t want to answer
the question.” Continuing students mentioned similar feelings of anxiety related to
producing language for teachers, including a female from School D (Spanish, suburban)
who said, “I went back to school to go see my teacher. I hadn’t talked for a whole
summer, so I was kind of nervous because I didn’t know how my Spanish was, but …
then I got the hang of it after that.” Sometimes, nervousness about language production
in the classroom context took the form of anxiety about making mistakes and how it
might look: “I feel like I know it pretty well, but I’m not excellent at it, so if I make a
mistake, it looks like…I dunno…” said one continuing female from School A (Spanish,
159 urban). In all of these cases, however, we can see that the students did not talk about
experiencing generalized or constant anxiety in the classroom; instead, they focused on
individual experiences like grammar tests, direct questioning, or communicating after
returning after time away.
The students were not just nervous about producing language, but they also
expressed anxiety about comprehending spoken language by their teachers and their
aides. We have already seen how Carlos was nervous about understanding his teacher
and being more behind than other students in his class. A continuing female from the
same school said, “Going to kindergarten, I didn’t know any Spanish, and the teacher
would just give me directions in Spanish, and I’d be confused.” A continuing female
from School B (French, urban) said, “When I was talking to somebody that was older
[like some of my teachers or interns], they always talked a lot faster, and I couldn’t really
understand what they were saying, and that was hard.” Clearly, anxiety was not just a
function of having to produce the language, but it was also something that students
mentioned as a part of understanding what teachers were saying and communicating to
them. These situations and explanations give evidence that the subscale questions on the
modified AMTB were not too far off the mark in establishing how to ask students about
language anxiety, even in the immersion setting. The results from the quantitative
analysis are also supported, since there was not much difference in the interview
responses between the continuing and non-continuing students.
Immersion educators would certainly agree that this type of anxiety is normal in a
program which follows Krashen’s (1981) “Input Hypothesis” of “input + 1,” in which he
160 has suggested that teachers use language that is one step beyond the current level of
proficiency of their students. MacIntyre and his colleagues, in a study of immersion
students’ anxiety and willingness to communicate, explained how this dynamic would
occur in the immersion context:
Why then would the immersion group be relatively apprehensive about
communicating? The answer might lie in the classroom demands placed on
students. If teachers generally seek to challenge students as a means to facilitate
learning, then students will consistently be placed in situations that surpass their
ability, create discomfort, and provoke anxiety (MacIntyre et al., 2003b, p. 602).
Students experiencing anxiety in the immersion classroom, therefore, were merely
learning as they were intended. Accordingly, they were familiar enough with anxiety-
producing situations related to language learning that they usually did not let it affect how
they saw their own identities as language learners. It is thus not surprising that their
language learning anxiety was not correlated with other aspects of their motivation, nor
did it seem to affect their decision to continue or not to continue. They reflected on
isolated anxiety-provoking incidents that they were able to rationalize in the context of
being successful as language learners. Attribution theorists would argue that they were
controlling their affective learning experiences with this rationalization (Ushioda, 2001),
and self-efficacy theorists would say that they were developing their own self-efficacy
with regard to language use (Bandura, 1997). Thus, the attribution and self-efficacy
theories related to motivation, where students are able to take positive and negative
161 experiences, successes and failures, and interpret them in a variety of ways, offer an
important means of interpreting these results.
The Realities of Immersion Graduate Anxiety: Beyond the Classroom
The shape and nature of “Target language use anxiety,” true to the
conceptualization in the socio-educational model, did go beyond the classroom as the
students spoke in the interviews. When asked about being nervous about communicating
in the target language, some students reflected immediately on experiences abroad or
with speakers of the language outside of the classroom context. Indeed, this was a more
popular area of reflection for the interviewees than talking about the classroom context; it
seemed that, in some cases, the experiences of travel or exposure to the other language in
a different place was more intense for the students and thus more a part of their
reflections in the interviews. Furthermore, the students only mentioned their anxiety in
these contexts in relation to native speakers of the language and/or adult speakers;
somewhat challenging the importance of the statements on the modified AMTB (“I am
afraid other students will laugh at me when I speak [target language],” for instance). It
was clear that the students were not anxious about fellow language learners, rather, they
focused on people whom they evaluated as more proficient in the language than them.
This is not to say, as we saw with Carlos, that the students did not compare themselves;
merely that they did not talk about their anxiety about other students’ judgments of them.
As in the classroom context, students talked about anxiety relating to producing
the language. Often, this occurred when they were called upon unexpectedly to perform
by their parents. Several Spanish immersion students mentioned ordering in restaurants
162 or other food establishments in their neighborhoods. A non-continuing female from
School A (Spanish, urban) gave a typical comment of this kind:
There’s a bakery by my house, and a couple stores where Spanish people work.
And my mom, she’s really really bad at speaking Spanish, so she wants me or my
brother to do it. And sometimes, when [I’m] put on the spot, I get really shy.
French students tended to reflect on interactions during travel experiences if they had had
them, since there was not an analogous community of French speakers in the
metropolitan area that served as the setting for this study. Some had run into native
speakers in other circumstances like this continuing male from School B (French, urban):
At a certain point, I was visiting with one of my dad’s old friends, and they
brought in some of their friends, one of which was Swiss. And he spoke French,
and I was caught completely off guard. So I couldn’t…really think about what to
say! But eventually I said a few things, nothing actually that intelligent, just
‘Bonjour.’
When I probed further about why he was nervous, he said, “The point is that I wasn’t
ready…I didn’t have anything to speak about…and I hadn’t spoken French for a bit
because it was summer.” From these interviews and others, it is clear that the students
experienced anxiety outside of the classroom context when they were “put on the spot” to
produce language by circumstances or well-meaning adults. Issues with understanding
language were less common in this context, perhaps because it was more unlikely for
immersion students to be put on the spot in terms of understanding language than it was
for them to be asked to perform in the target language.
163
It is also important to note that many interview participants claimed never to be
nervous at all about communicating in the target language, either in or outside of class.
More specifically, when asked directly about whether or not they had ever been nervous
about communicating in the target language, they simply answered, “No.” A continuing
male from School A (Spanish, urban), who self-identified as Hispanic, explained why he
did not feel nervous speaking with his Spanish-dominant family in Mexico:
In [my father’s] town, everyone who was born in that town stays in that town.
They’ve never left, and he’s the only one who’s ever left the town. So he’s
known, and I’m known, and my brother’s known [as non-native speakers]. I
could still talk to them, but they’d correct me if I was wrong. Sometimes in
English I hate when I’m corrected, but in Spanish, because I’m still learning it, it
helps me, so, I go, ‘oh, ok.’
This quote illustrates an important aspect of the immersion students’ anxiety about
language. When the student above was able to identify his own position as a language
learner with his interlocutors, he felt much more at ease and had less anxiety. His fears
of making mistakes were allayed by the fact that he was not taken off guard or surprised
by the interaction. This contrasts with the previous quote from the French student who
was surprised by his father’s Swiss friend. The students’ feelings of self-efficacy in these
two circumstances were very different, and thus resulted in importantly divergent
behavior and created very different memories about these situations. As such, I would
argue that this aspect of target language use anxiety reflects self-efficacy theory more
164 than it connects with theories about achievement and motivation as in the socio-
educational model.
Conclusion
The quantitative and qualitative data support one another with regard to language
learning anxiety; it is clear that motivation and anxiety for this population were not
necessarily linked, and that anxiety was also not linked with any particular tendency to
persist in immersion continuation programs either. However, the qualitative data were
much more revealing about the nature of the complexity of this link. Although many
students described experiencing anxiety both within and outside of the classroom context,
the secondary theoretical frameworks of attribution theory and self-efficacy theory
suggested that this might be a result of students taking successes and failures and
interpreting them in a variety of ways, not necessarily always deciding that anxiety was a
bad thing to have or to experience. This interpretation was supported by some students’
abilities to explain their anxiety about language use outside of the classroom, as a
function of the environment, their interlocutor, or other adverse effects like being forced
into a conversation.
Influence of Parental and Peer Relationships
The importance of interpersonal relationships to early adolescent students’
attitudes towards school has been well-documented, and the National Middle School
Association has long held the principle of fostering and promoting strong interpersonal
relationships in the school community as one of the main pillars of reforming modern
middle school education in the United States (Erb, 2001; see also Jackson & Davis,
165 2000). Both parental and peer relationships have also been strongly connected to early
adolescents’ school-related motivation (see for example Nelson & DeBacker, 2008;
Wentzel, 1998; Wentzel, Barry, & Caldwell, 2004). However, the socio-educational
model has considered only a narrow definition of interpersonal relationships in its
operationalization of language learning motivation. First, in some versions of the model,
“Parental encouragement” was included as a subscale related to home background
characteristics (Gardner, 1985a). Another interpersonal relationship widely considered to
be heavily influential on early adolescents, the one that they have with their peers, has not
been included in the socio-educational model. I include it in this analysis because of the
strong results from the literature in the field about peer relationships and their importance
to early adolescents, as well as my interview data, which reflected the fact that social
relationships were, indeed, important to students. We have also seen that other theories
in the field, particularly including self-efficacy theory, hold that the social and familial
lives of students have a great effect on students’ motivation at this age.
The relationship between parental and peer influence and persistence and attrition
in immersion programs, as we have seen from Carlos’ and AnneMarie’s cases and the
literature in the field, is not always straightforward. Although parent attitudes and
opinions about immersion education are often carefully considered in immersion research
(see for example Bruck, 1978; Campbell, 1992; Halsall, 1994; Hayden, 1988), the
findings have been inconclusive. There is very little research on peer influence on
immersion students. The reasons for this omission are perhaps related to similar
omissions in the literature: the decision whether or not to continue in the immersion track
166 Table 4.5
Questions on the Modified AMTB for the “Parental Encouragement” Subscale
My parents tell me that the [target] language will be important for me when I leave
school.
My parents think that I should continue studying [target language] all through school.
My parents really encourage me to study [target language].
My parents think I should spend more time studying [target language].
My parents want me to learn the [target] language.
My parents encourage me to practice my [target language] as much as possible.
Note. Questions adapted from Gardner (1985a).
is ultimately not seen as dependent on the experiences or choices of individual students.
Rather, addressing the concerns of the adult stakeholders is prioritized, as they are the
decision-makers. Hopefully, a focus on both the parental and peer relationships and their
influence on the immersion students in this study can shed more light on this area.
Parental Influence as Multidirectional
Survey Responses
On the modified AMTB used in this study, the subscale “Parental
encouragement” was measured from six different statements, as listed in Table 4.5. As
one can see, these statements are actually quite relevant to the topical framework of
persistence and attrition, since the first two statements address how the parents may or
may not encourage students to continue or not with their studies. They also apply well to
the immersion context.
167 Table 4.6
Cronbach’s Alpha* for All Subscales in the Modified AMTB
Cronbach’s Alpha
Number of items
Attitudes toward the Target Community .884 8
Interest in World Languages .787 7
Attitudes toward Learning the Target Language
(positively-worded statements)
.867 4
Attitudes toward Learning the Target Language
(negatively-worded statements)
.786 4
Integrative Orientation .544 3
Instrumental Orientation .511 3
Target language use anxiety
(negatively-worded statements)
.745 5
Parental Encouragement .518 6
*Cronbach’s alpha measurements range from 0-1, with higher numbers indicating more internal
consistency of the subscales.
Some of the results from a statistical analysis of the performance of this subscale
in the 131 surveys are interesting, particularly when compared to the performance of the
other seven subscales. First of all, one can consider the Cronbach’s alpha values
associated with the subscales in this study. Cronbach’s alpha, a measurement of
consistency within subscales on a survey like the modified AMTB, ranges from 0-1, and
higher values indicate that respondents answered the questions in the subscale more
consistently, and there is more correlation among their responses to the questions in the
168 subscale. Generally speaking, a Cronbach’s alpha of .70 or higher is considered to be a
sign of sufficient internal consistency. However, Cronbach’s alpha is also a function of
the number of items in the subscales, where having more items in the subscale increases
the likelihood that the Cronbach’s alpha will be higher.
As Table 4.6 shows, Cronbach’s alpha was strong for most of the subscales,
indicating that the instrument is valid in this sense of internal coherence. The few
exceptions where the coefficient fell below .70 most often had a very small number of
items associated with the subscale (“Integrative orientation” and “Instrumental
orientation”). The one exception to this was the “Parental encouragement” subscale.
Since the “Parental encouragement” subscale has a somewhat high number of items
associated with it, one can surmise that the student respondents responded somewhat less
consistently to this subscale, in comparison with the other subscales used to measure
characteristics in this modified AMTB. For this study, I would suggest that this indicates
that the students who filled out these surveys were less consistent in how they saw their
parents’ encouragement of their study in the immersion context. This is not to say that
they thought that the parents were not encouraging, rather that they did not
necessarily receive one message about their parents’ thoughts and beliefs about the
importance of studying the target language.
This ambiguity is supported by the results from another part of the student and
parent surveys. Both the students and the parents filled out 10 identical questions that
asked them to evaluate the student’s proficiency in completing a designated task. Based
on Fortune (2001), these questions reflected both productive and receptive language
169 Table 4.7
Cohen’s Kappa* Coefficients between Student and Parent Evaluations of Proficiency
Task Kappa
He/she can watch and understand a TV program or video. .094
When he/she hears native speakers speaking about a familiar topic, he/she can
understand everything and does not need to hear it more than one time.
.129*
He/she can understand other students when working in a group. .124
He/she can tell a story that he/she knows, such as a fairytale. .079
He/she can comfortably talk with a native speaker about any general topic. .110
He/she can say hello and answer questions about his/her family and him/her. .284*
He/she can read and understand a story written for kids his/her age. .192*
He/she can read and understand a magazine. .139*
He/she can write about his/her life, like in a diary entry. .120
He/she can write a summary of a story that he/she has read. .220*
*Kappa is significant at the .05 level.
skills, and this section of the surveys was intended to see how much the students and their
parents agreed about issues related to the students’ proficiency. They had to say whether
they thought the student “could not do it at all,” “Could do it, but not very well,” “Could
do it pretty well,” or “Could do it very well.” They also had the option to respond, “I do
not know if he/she/I could do it.” To compare the parent and student responses, I
calculated the Cohen’s kappa coefficient, a measurement of agreement between two
170 raters on categorical items like these. This coefficient ranges from 0-1, with higher
values indicating more agreement between the raters.
Table 4.7 shows the results, and one can see that the Cohen’s kappa coefficients
were significant for five of the ten items, indicating agreement between students and their
parents. That is to say, they did not always agree (even on similar productive/receptive
questions), nor did they always disagree. Again, we can see that there is some
inconsistency in how the students and their parents connected about important issues
related to language learning and immersion education. The quantitative results suggest
that there was not necessarily an open line of communication between the parent and
student participants in this study; even though they might have been talking about issues,
they did not always understand the position or the experiences of the other person in the
relationship. For anyone who knows early adolescents, this is perhaps not a surprise.
Indeed, Gardner (1985b) acknowledged this gap in communication in one of his early
publications about the socio-educational model, which might be one reason why this
subscale has been omitted from more recent versions.
As a result of the survey responses, one can see that communication between
parents and students in this study was somewhat ambiguous. The qualitative data and
analysis can hopefully give further information about some of these areas.
Interview Responses
Many of the immersion graduates whom I interviewed readily spoke about their
parents’ influence. This was particularly the case when it came to their beliefs related to
immersion education and language learning. Students did not hesitate to explain openly
171 that their beliefs about language learning came from their parents. An example of such
parroting can be seen in this exchange with a continuing female from School C (French,
suburban):
Student: My parents told me that…French can really help...when you get older. It
will improve your vocabulary and it will help you in college if you continue.
Interviewer: How will it help you in college?
Student: It will improve your vocabulary and um…when um…I dunno.
This young woman clearly had an answer for my question, but when pressed, she was not
able to explain it in great detail. Another continuing female from the same school
similarly stated, “My mom says [learning a language in immersion school] works my
brain more, and I’ll be able to learn more languages when I grow up, and it’ll help me
through high school and stuff like that.” A continuing female from School B (French,
urban) said, “Well [my parents] just like want me to learn because…they think that if you
learn different languages you’ll get smarter or something like that.” Clearly, these
students were listening to their parents and taking what they said about the importance of
learning a language at face value. In no interview did a student question that received
wisdom about learning language. This particular dynamic in the interviews, I feel, relates
back to self-efficacy theory. At this age of early adolescence and the transition between
elementary and middle school, these students are still dependent on and enabled by their
parents in how they build self-knowledge and self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997).
Furthermore, what they were mentioning were essentially motivational factors for
learning language; this supports Gardner et al.’s (1999) assertion that motivational
172 intensity correlates positively with parental encouragement, and it replicates the statistical
data that showed that the student participants agreed fairly strongly with the positive
influence of their parents.
This is not to say that all types of parental communication and encouragement
were always received by the students in such an accepting manner. Indeed, when it came
to the precise question about whether or not to continue in the immersion continuation
program, the students whom I interviewed gave answers that showed that the influence of
parents was not always unidirectional. Some students did just leave the decision up to
their parents, and followed their lead. I found that this occurred primarily with both
continuing and non-continuing students who did not have strong opinions about
immersion education either way; their interviews were generally characterized by
positivity and compliance with figures of authority. For instance, one non-continuing
female from School D (Spanish, suburban) said:
[Not continuing] was mostly [my parents’] idea. I’m not really good at decisions
about which schools to go to because there are a lot of things to look at and
debate. So they said, ‘Go to school [in the monolingual English school],’ and I
was like, ‘Ok.’
Several continuing students seemed to experience a similar dynamic in their families, like
a continuing female from School C (French, suburban) who said:
It wasn’t really a decision…I really didn’t have to make [a decision]. My parents
know that I’m good, like I know French, and I can keep going, and I don’t
struggle with it. So it wasn’t really a yes-or-no, like ‘Are you gonna do it?’ or…
173
‘Do you not wanna do it?’ Because I think they knew that I wanted to do it, so it
wasn’t really much of a discussion.
This type of interaction between parents and students suggested that these early
adolescents were indeed guided significantly by their parents in their decision to continue
or not. One other important observation about this particular detail is that this type of
parental compliance seemed to be somewhat more common in the female respondents
than the male.
But I also found that every type of conflict that could happen, did happen.
Sometimes parents wanted one thing and the student wanted another, and they went with
the student, or the parent. The idea that the parent’s preferences were always heeded
simply did not hold true for all of these students. One female non-continuing student
from School B (French, urban) explained how she and her parents interacted in this
respect: “They thought that it would be important for me to continue, but we couldn’t
really find that many schools that had French, except for the ones I didn’t like.” A
continuing male from School E (Spanish, suburban) experienced a similar dynamic with
his mother, with a different outcome:
I was kind of thinking about going to a different school, and I was kind of
thinking that I didn’t fully need to learn Spanish. But then my mom, she said,
‘Spanish will help you in life, I’m pretty sure of it, so, you should probably think
about staying here.’ And so I was like, ‘Ok.’
As we can see from these two examples, in both situations, the parents wanted the
students to continue in the immersion program, and the students were not as sure.
174 However, in the first case, the student’s desires prevailed, and in the second one, the
parent’s strong suggestion ended up being the deciding factor.
Other students disagreed with their parents about continuing in the opposite
direction: their parents wanted them to leave the immersion track, and they wanted to
continue. As before, the outcomes varied. We have already seen the conflict that
occurred between Carlos and his mother, and the result of him leaving the program for
one semester, and then subsequently returning. Although the eventual return to
immersion after making the opposite decision was unique, other students clearly
experienced the same type of conflict with their parents. Unlike Carlos, one non-
continuing male from School C (French, suburban) ended up leaving immersion, despite
his explanation:
I kind of wanted to [continue], my mom just said I couldn’t. I was kind of falling
back on French…she thought I could do better at [the monolingual English
middle school]. I want to go back still, but my mom won’t let me.
A similar situation happened to a non-continuing female from School E (Spanish,
suburban), who explained that her parents wanted to homeschool her, even though she
would “still like to go to school because I’m very social.” She eventually decided to be
homeschooled and forego the immersion experience.
The communication and influence that occurred between parents and their
children in this study were clearly not unidirectional. This was not a case of parents
telling children what to do about continuing or not continuing in immersion, and the
children immediately following their parents’ wishes. However, it is important also to
175 remember that these students did parrot their parents’ statements about language learning
without question, and also that many did mention their parents’ desires, even when not
asked about it. With this information, we can hypothesize that motivation and parental
influence were linked, but that there was no consistent link between parental influence
and persistence in immersion programs. If we return to the weak Cronbach’s alpha
results (Table 4.6) for this subscale, this idea is borne out to a certain extent, since several
questions in the “Parental encouragement” subscale asked the students about their
parents’ encouragement of their persistence in the program. Because the Cronbach’s
alpha was weak for this subscale, that indicates a certain lack of consistency in the
students’ responses about their parents’ influence on their persistence in immersion.
Here, again, I believe the characterization of the self-efficacy theory can be
particularly enlightening. Where some of the students’ thoughts and beliefs about their
own capabilities and interests were still rooted in the home sphere, some students were
growing in their self-knowledge and their self-appraisal skills (Bandura, 1997), and they
were not as concerned about differing from their parents’ views. Students’ beliefs may
have come from their parents, but their multiple desires relating to other factors about
persisting in immersion created a “site of struggle,” as Norton (1995; Weger-Guntharp,
2006) would attest. I look into Norton’s concept of investment more as I explore the
other important interpersonal relationship to these students: the peer relationship.
Giving a Voice to Peer Influence
Where parents affected students in many ways, sometimes inspiring them and
sometimes evoking contradiction or disagreement, the students were much more
176 straightforward about the fact that they were directly influenced by their peers in how
they felt about immersion education, and indeed, in whether or not they continued in the
immersion program. Both Carlos and AnneMarie addressed this in vivid detail during
their interviews, and in both cases, their eventual decisions about continuation seemed to
coordinate closely with what their peers had decided to do. Again, I do not have any
quantitative survey data about this particular aspect of the students’ language learning
motivation, as it has never been included in the socio-educational model or any varieties
of the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery. I only found one reference to peer relationships
in any explanation of the socio-educational model, and that was listed as a part of
Gardner’s definition of students’ attitudes toward the learning situation, where he listed
students’ attitudes towards their classmates as a potential indicator variable (Gardner,
2001b). However, this has never appeared in any visual representation of the socio-
educational model or in a version of the AMTB. At the end of this section, on the
strength of these qualitative data, I will offer some possible explanations why this
omission may have occurred in the past, and why it should be rectified in the future.
Among the continuing students, many immersion graduates mentioned the
influence of their peers as a reason to stay in the immersion program. The frequency of
these comments was matched by their intensity; not only were peers seen to be important
influences by many, but they were often seen as the foremost or the most important
reason that could possibly be imagined. One continuing female from School C (French,
suburban) articulated the pull of social influence to stay in the immersion program well;
when asked what she would say to convince another friend to continue with her, she said:
177
Well if it was just one friend I’d be like, ‘Well, don’t you want to be with all of
us?’ Because middle school is a tough time to change schools when you don’t
know anybody. That’s the time when everybody’s in their little groups.
This student was afraid of the isolation that might have resulted specifically in middle
school from switching to a school that contained a different population than the
immersion program. Similarly, when I asked a continuing female from School E
(Spanish, suburban) why she chose to continue, she succinctly stated, “I didn’t really
want to go to a different school because I wanted to speak Spanish here and stay with
most of my friends.” A continuing male from School A (Spanish, urban) said this as the
reason why he continued: “It’s mostly because of friends and the teachers I’ve already
known.” It is worth mentioning that a few continuing students did briefly lament the
limited social options open to them with continuing in the immersion track. However, it
rarely seemed to be a significant factor in their responses; the few who mentioned it, only
mentioned it if I pressed them for a negative thing about being in the immersion
continuation program.
Among the non-continuing students, peer influences were also mentioned with
intensity, although the actual nature of the influence varied. Sometimes, it seemed that
the students were happy to leave the social environment of immersion school for the
preferred home-schooling or monolingual English program. Two non-continuing
students from School D (Spanish, suburban) agreed, saying “Once you get to the end,
you’re just sick of [the other students]” (female student) and “You get sick of them, and
maybe by fifth or sixth grade they get all like cliquey and weird” (male student). A non-
178 continuing female from School C (French, suburban) explained the social pressures that
kept her from wanting to continue in more vivid detail:
There was this one girl who wasn’t really kind to me. She had some issues with
social stuff, and she would always give me a hard time last year. [She’d say] ‘I
did better than you on this test, or you did better than me on that test.’ But she
went to [the middle school immersion continuation program] and I came to [the
monolingual English middle school], so now my life’s better again.
In this particular case, it seemed that the negative social factors were the primary reason
why this student chose to leave the immersion track, although she also mentioned issues
with her academic performance that compounded her disinterest in the immersion
program. I feel that this particular case also suggests that attrition from an immersion
program should not always be considered as a failure or a negative choice for the well-
being of the student; it is clear that in this case, the student ended up much more content
in the monolingual English program.
Positive peer influence also sometimes helped students to decide to leave the
immersion continuation program, particularly when they saw that they could stay with
their friends in a different school. The non-continuing female student from School C
discussed above also professed that the fact that one of her good friends was not
continuing made that transition easier. She said, “Well, we had the same idea, me and
my friend. We’ve been together since kindergarten, and we didn’t want to separate. She
was having the same issues as me.” We saw in the case of AnneMarie that there was a
similar peer influence to leave the program when a number of students left for the same
179 alternate Montessori program. Another non-continuing female student from
AnneMarie’s school, also attending the Montessori school, articulated the same reason
for leaving: “Most of my close friends went to another school, and I actually liked that
school better.” Clearly, for non-continuing students, the idea that they would have
friends to accompany them out of the immersion program was a comfort, and something
that certainly affected their decision-making process to some extent.
Of course, some non-continuing students had regrets about not continuing; those
regrets were often due to social issues. In the above discussion about parental influence,
one student from School C (French, suburban) mentioned that he wanted to continue, but
his mother did not want him to. He furthermore said, “A bunch of my friends were there
[in the immersion program]. I knew them since kindergarten, and it’s kind of hard to
leave your friends from kindergarten to sixth grade.” He continued and explained that his
new friends were not as nice as his old immersion friends, who judged him “like who I
am.” This echoes Carlos’ experience of leaving the immersion program and then
realizing that “you don’t get friends like you did before.” A non-continuing female from
School E (Spanish, suburban) agreed, “I lost some very good friends when I went to [the
monolingual English school]. I want as many friends as my new school, it’s really scary
not knowing anyone in middle school.” This quote provides an interesting contrast to the
statement at the beginning of this section from the continuing student who was also afraid
of leaving her friends in the context of middle school social pressures. In this case, the
social issues did not take precedence, but they were clearly of a strong consideration in
this student’s mind.
180
Some of these responses do provide some hints about why, perhaps, peer
influence has not traditionally been included in the socio-educational model. The
immersion graduates, in talking about peer influence, rarely mentioned anything relating
to their desire to learn language. It is almost as if the peer-related motivation to persist in
immersion education existed separately from the educational practice of immersion
education itself, instead grounding itself in another part of the students’ identities. As
Norton (2000a), Ushioda (2009), and others have argued, many SLA theorists have failed
to integrate the language learner and the language learning context effectively. The fact
is, even if researchers do not consider peer influence to be a factor in language learning
motivation, it is certainly a highly emotionally and psychologically charged part of these
students’ experiences as language learners. Recent studies based on the attribution theory
have suggested that reactions from peers and teachers might have more of an influence on
students and their motivation than actual achievement, so much that they “override the
significance of the achievement itself” (Hareli & Weiner, 2002, p. 183). Students’ social
role in a community of learners was always present, whether or not they were actually
actively learning the language or reflecting on the learning of language at that point.
Identity was clearly a “nonunitary” and “contradictory” factor for these students as they
moved from a self-efficacy defined by parents to one that is more dependent on peer
interaction (Norton, 2000a, p. 125; see also Bandura, 1997). Perhaps it is time to expand
the definition of language learning motivation to include additional factors that strongly
influence the learners, even if they are not directly related to language.
181
Conclusion
Current versions of the socio-educational model have omitted parental
encouragement as a factor in language learning motivation, and peer influence has never
been considered as a stand-alone factor in the model. However, using “Parental
encouragement” as a subscale in my survey, and examining parental influence and peer
influence in the qualitative data have offered some important insights into a more
complete understanding of how interpersonal relationships can affect students’ language
learning motivation, as well as their desire to persist in the immersion program. Parents
clearly influenced their offspring when it came to the students’ beliefs about language
learning, yet parental influence was more ambiguous when the students were negotiating
whether or not to continue in the immersion program. I believe that both self-efficacy
theory and the concept of investment help to explain here that the immersion graduates
did depend on their parents for some parts of their own self-perceptions, but that, when
other student needs came into play, parental influence may not have figured in their
motivation in the same unidirectional manner. Peer influence, however, was often very
easy to detect and trace in students’ desires to keep learning language through their
persistence in the immersion program. But perhaps because it is more difficult to link
peer influence directly to attitudes and beliefs about language learning per se, it seems to
be largely disregarded by both L2 learning motivation researchers and immersion
researchers. I feel that a step toward creating a more holistic picture of student
motivation would be to reconsider the role that peer influence plays, given the fact that it
182 was one of the primary factors addressed by the immersion graduates in their decisions to
continue or not in the immersion program.
Attitudes Toward the Learning Situation
As shown in Chapter Two, the important factor of student attitudes toward the
learning situation has had two indicator variables commonly associated with it in the
socio-educational model: evaluation of the teacher and course evaluation (Gardner,
2001b, 2005). These two variables and their associated subscales were not appropriate to
include in a modified AMTB in the immersion context. However, more generally,
student attitudes toward the learning situation have been associated with the class of
variables relating to any affective reaction to any aspect of the class: “classroom
‘atmosphere,’ the quality of the materials, availability of materials, the curriculum, the
teacher, etc.” (Gardner, 2005, p. 10). Such an expansively defined factor clearly relates
to many of the motivational factors already addressed in this chapter, yet, again, it is also
limited in the immersion context due to the fact that the immersion students do not take
one language course or have one language teacher. In this section, therefore, I examine
students’ attitudes toward the learning situation in the immersion context. I first look at
how the students reflected on their teachers, since that was something that did seem to be
important to the interview respondents. Then, I look into another factor related to the
learning situation that emerged from the qualitative data: the factor of overall school
environment, particularly the shift in school environment between the elementary
immersion school and the middle/junior high school where the immersion continuation
program was housed. These aspects of the students’ attitudes toward their learning
183 situation offer insights about not just student motivation as defined in the socio-
educational model, but also help to examine the possible connection between the
students’ attitudes about their learning situation and their decisions to persist in
immersion education.
Evaluation of Teachers
We’ve always scored on teachers, and that’s one of the biggest things. The
teachers always make a big difference. (continuing female from School C –
French, suburban).
During my interviews, and as seen in the cases of Carlos and AnneMarie, I found
that the students did talk about their teachers a great deal. This occurred even though I
did not include any direct questions about teachers in my interview protocol. Students
most often talked about their teachers in response to one of my first questions, about their
favorite or least favorite things about learning in the target language. Both continuing
and non-continuing students praised the teachers who knew “what kind of person I am”
(continuing male from School A, Spanish, urban); who “taught people individually”
(continuing female from School C, French, suburban); who were “the most helpful, the
most kind…just really good with kids” (non-continuing female from School D, Spanish,
suburban); to whom the students could say, “Oh, I don’t understand this,” or “Can you
explain this to me?” (continuing female from School B, French, urban); or who could “be
really calm and go with the flow for the kids” (continuing male from School A, Spanish,
urban). Great memories were generated for a continuing female from School D (Spanish,
suburban), who said, “One of my favorite teachers in second grade…she always used to
184 play music for us, and whenever we were doing like silent time reading, we would build
forts, and we would read, and it was really fun.” A non-continuing male student from
School C (French, suburban) bragged about his fifth-grade French homeroom teacher
who arranged a performance competition and allowed her students to pretend to camp
out; he said with some pride, “Everyone was so jealous of our teacher.” The intensity
and consistency of these positive responses about teachers indicates that they were bright
points for many students. However, a closer reading of the comments above reveals that
very few of these statements about teachers mentioned anything about language learning.
Instead, the teachers were praised less for what or how they were teaching, and more for
their personal qualities unrelated to subject matter or the language of instruction.
Students who made more negative statements about their elementary immersion
teachers also focused on the teachers’ personal qualities rather than what or how they
taught. Teachers whom the students deemed “a little more strict” (continuing female
from School C, French, suburban) or “boring” (continuing female from School A,
French, urban) were seen less positively. Some students linked teachers’ negative
characteristics to students’ opinions about immersion education as a whole; a continuing
female from School D (Spanish, suburban) suggested that other students did not like
Spanish immersion because the teachers “were really strict, and I don’t think a lot of the
kids in my class liked that.” In that case, the teacher probably served to decrease the
student’s L2 learning motivation. Ultimately, I was not surprised by the characteristics of
these teachers that were appreciated and disliked by students; indeed, the positive
characteristics certainly fit what Gardner listed as positive characteristics of “target
185 language teachers” in the original AMTB: friendly, organized, imaginative, patient,
dependable, approachable, sincere, interesting, etc. (Gardner, 1985a). They also mirrored
the work of Noels (2001a) and Nikolov (2001). As such, they serve as a verification of
the accuracy of the AMTB and some of the instruments used in the quantitative studies
listed above, even though the nature of immersion education still precludes the accurate
use of these types of instruments in the manner in which they have been used in other
contexts.
It is clear from the interview responses that the evaluation of teachers did enter
into how students reflected on their experiences in immersion education, even though no
questions were asked directly about this topic. This certainly reflects findings in the field
about the influence of teachers on students’ learning motivation. Outside of immersion
research, most of the numerous studies about teachers’ influence on L2 learning
motivation have shown a connection between teachers’ instructional choices,
communicative styles, and other factors, and students’ language learning motivation (see
for example Bernaus & Gardner, 2008; Gardner, Masgoret, Tennant, & Mihic, 2004;
Guilloteaux & Dörnyei, 2008; Nikolov, 2001; Kuhlemeier et al., 1996; Noels, 2001;
Noels et al., 1999; Smith & Massey, 1987). Research on middle school students outside
of L2 learning environments has repeatedly shown that student perceptions of teachers as
being supportive and caring relates directly to their own motivation and performance
(Wentzel, 1998; Wentzel & Wigfield, 1998). The only studies in the immersion context
that addressed this directly did not focus on one teacher, but rather on a holistic
consideration of an immersion program. Halsall’s 1994 survey of coordinators of French
186 immersion in school boards across Canada suggested that teachers were considered by
administrators to be a factor in retaining students. A study by Lewis and Shapson (1989)
of students who left an immersion program clearly indicated that “the quality of
instruction” was a major reason for attrition; this was not linked directly to an evaluation
of teachers, but rather more of a reflection on the curriculum.
The findings from the interviews in this study suggest that there is a distinct
possibility that elementary immersion teachers played a role in these students’ motivation
to learn languages. The nature of this role is not clear from the data collected, however,
particularly because the students themselves rarely connected their observations or
reflections about their teachers with their experiences learning language, instead focusing
on the teachers’ personal qualities. That is to say, the students connected their teachers
with their enjoyment (or dislike) of school, rather than their enjoyment (or dislike) of
languages. One can recall here Hareli and Weiner’s (2002) finding that reactions from
peers and teachers might influence students’ motivation more than any actual
achievement. Following this line of thinking, a disconnect between what exactly is
taught in the classroom and what motivates the students is certainly possible. As with
peer-related motivation, it is almost as if teacher-related motivation existed separately
from the educational practice of immersion education itself, instead grounding itself in
another part of the students’ identities. Further, more focused study with immersion
students about how they view their teachers could certainly shed more light on
elementary immersion teachers’ roles in their students L2 learning motivation. Such a
187 study might also serve to show how SLA theorists can further integrate the language
learner and the language learning context (Norton, 2000a; Ushioda, 2009).
One aspect of immersion teachers’ roles in their students’ L2 learning motivation
has not been discussed yet in this section: the role that they played in their students’
persistence in the immersion continuation program. I would argue that it was very
difficult to link consistently the students’ evaluations of their immersion teachers with
their persistence. I found that continuing and non-continuing students made positive
comments about teachers relatively equally. Negative comments about previous teachers
were almost exclusively made by continuing students. There could be several reasons for
this lack of connection between the comments made about teachers and the students’
choices to continue in immersion. First of all, it is possible that the non-continuing
students only wanted to praise their previous teachers and program out of either a sense
of propriety or a romanticizing of their past experiences. Another possibility was that the
students were aware that, given how many teachers that they had had, one teacher was
not necessarily indicative of how their entire immersion experience would be in the
future. Finally, along with the reasons outlined above, it is possible that the ways that
teachers affect their students, as in the parent-child relationships outlined above, must
simply be understood as complex social relationships that range in innumerable
variations from individual to individual. Trying to conclude that teachers always
motivate or influence their students in the same way is simply impossible.
188
Evaluation of School Environment
Although Gardner has defined the learning situation as either a course evaluation
or an evaluation of teachers, the students in this study also identified issues that transcend
classroom practices and relate to the school as a whole. Their comments about school
community were certainly attributable in part to the moment in the students’ educational
lives when I conducted this study: the transition out of the elementary immersion
program and (if they so chose) into a middle/junior high school immersion program. One
can recall that the elementary programs of the five schools in this study are all whole-
school models, followed by strand models in the middle/junior high school continuation
programs. In the elementary immersion schools, there was very little change in the
student population over the years of the students’ education, since (with some exceptions)
new students could not be introduced to a curriculum conducted in Spanish or French
after kindergarten if they had no background in the language. However, upon entering
the middle/junior high school, the students in all five schools entered very different
educational environments, where they learned only as one sub-population in a much
larger school. Indeed, as we saw in AnneMarie’s case study, the characteristics of the
continuation program had the potential to be extremely influential in the decision that the
students made about continuation in immersion education during this transition. A more
serious consideration of how the students spoke of the school environments in both the
elementary and middle/junior high school programs can help explain the role, if any, that
this played in students’ motivation and desire to persist in immersion education.
189
I found that, during the interviews, many students reflected on the intimate
community of their elementary schools. This was not unique to students from one
particular elementary school; it seemed that all five elementary schools fostered similar
sentiments in their students, despite their differences in size. A continuing male student
from School A (Spanish, urban) explained about an important experience that, to him,
encapsulated the intimate climate of his elementary immersion experience:
The elementary school we used to go to had between 700 and 750 kids, so
everyone should have known who everybody was…Every year we had new kids
[in kindergarten] so we had to remember their names. And so the talent show is
very important to a lot of people, because you gotta yell most of the time and say
‘yes!’ when our friends are [performing.]
This student clearly felt connected to the many other students in his elementary school,
and the talent show was a time when he could show his membership to the community
and his desire to be a part of it by cheering for his friends. A female continuing student
from School C (French, suburban) told a parallel story from her experiences:
I remember the all-school get-together when the whole school would get together
and we’d just sing French songs for like thirty minutes straight…I remember
doing concerts in French – that was probably one of my favorite things in French
immersion and listening to the little kids when I was older doing the French things
thinking, ‘Oh, I did that when I was little!’
As in the previous quote, the positive memories of this student revolved around not just
school events, but also around a recognition of a shared history and culture with students
190 who came before and after her. This characterization of the immersion school
community parallels Bandura’s characterization of elementary schools as “a personalized
school environment of familiar peers” (1997, p. 178). A similar concept, “relatedness,”
has been cited by Noels (2009) as a “sense of belongingness with other people in one’s
community,” and corresponds with a stronger internalized sense of motivation (2009, p.
303). These students also had the shared identity as immersion language learners, where
they literally all spoke the same language. Clearly, the school community and the way
that the elementary immersion experience was structured created a type of learning
community that was very valuable and perhaps motivating to some students.
Before delving into a further analysis of the qualitative data, it is useful to review
some characteristics of the five immersion programs included in this study (see Table 3.3
for more detailed information), particularly with regard to the transition between the
elementary and the middle/junior high school programs. Again, one must recall that all
of the immersion continuation programs function as strands in larger middle/junior high
schools, and that the statistics about the middle/junior high school apply to the entire
schools and not the immersion continuation programs alone. Programs B and C feature
large increases in the student population of the school (300 students or more) from the
elementary to the middle/junior high schools, while Programs A, D, and E have less
significant increases. However, both Programs A and B feed into a junior high school
that shares a small building and a campus with a senior high school, suggesting that the
perceived size of the junior high school might be distorted somewhat larger to the
students. Program C similarly feeds into a shared middle school/high school campus, but
191 the campus is much larger and the two schools are separated more effectively. Therefore,
the demographic data suggest that the differences in size of the elementary and
middle/junior high school programs would certainly be felt very acutely by students from
School B, and possibly by students from Schools A and C as well. Students from
Schools D and E certainly might have felt the differences, but the demographic data do
not suggest that the differences are as considerable there as with the other programs.
In terms of socioeconomic and racial differences between the elementary
immersion school and the middle/junior high schools housing the immersion programs,
as we saw in Chapter Three, the elementary immersion schools are all less
socioeconomically and racially diverse than their corresponding middle/junior high
immersion continuation schools. The extent of these differences is not consistent,
however. Programs D and E certainly differ considerably from elementary to
middle/junior high school, given that the percentage of free/reduced lunch recipients
increases fivefold and both elementary schools have a student population that is at least
75 percent White, versus the much more diverse middle/junior high schools where the
immersion programs are housed. Program B also differs notably in the socioeconomic
status and race of the students from the elementary to the middle/junior high school
housing the immersion continuation program. Program A, with the most
socioeconomically and racially diverse elementary school, does shift in the racial makeup
of the student population from the elementary immersion to the junior high school
housing the immersion program, but I would argue that both schools are diverse, though
in different ways. Finally, Program C has very little racial and socioeconomic difference
192 between the elementary school and the middle school housing the immersion program;
both are quite affluent and are over 85 percent White.
In the interviews, the students, primarily those who had chosen not to continue,
voiced several different opinions about the differences between the elementary
immersion programs and the middle/junior high schools housing the continuation
programs. Perhaps the most general critique voiced by the students about the schools
housing the continuing programs involved what one non-continuing student called its
“atmosphere.” Some participants in the interviews keenly recognized Bandura’s
characterization of middle/junior high schools as “impersonal” and “departmentalized”
for early adolescent students (1997, p. 178). If an alternative was available to them, they
sometimes took it. A non-continuing male from School B (French, urban) spoke quite
vividly on the subject:
I visited the school with my mom and dad, and I didn’t like it. The atmosphere
wasn’t optimal. It was like a regular junior high. Like there were some mean
people, and when I was walking outside to get to the bus, this kid like barrels me
down…I didn’t like the school very much, it was dirty and it was like a junior
high.
The same student went on to describe the fact that the students in the monolingual
English school where he chose to matriculate (the same Montessori school as
AnneMarie) was much more “community-oriented” where students “work together, like a
community, we have class meetings.” A non-continuing female from School C (French,
suburban), where there was a considerable difference in size but very little demographic
193 difference between the elementary immersion school and the middle school housing the
immersion program, contrasted her middle school, where “they just take you through
little steps to get through the middle school,” with the middle school housing the
immersion program, where “they start right when you enter the doors, you’re
automatically a middle schooler.” Interestingly, the two middle schools contrasted in her
statement are almost demographically identical, including in their size. It was also
unclear in this student’s statement whether or not she knew this information before
making her choice whether or not to continue in the immersion continuation program.
Nonetheless, the fact that she brought it up demonstrates that, to some of these students,
regardless of demographic differences, the issue of navigating the transition from an
elementary culture to a middle/junior high school culture was very important, and
importantly stressful, to these students.
Beyond these general statements about the “atmosphere” of elementary schools
versus the middle/junior high schools, some of the most intense critiques of the
middle/junior high school housing the immersion continuation program came from
students who, like AnneMarie, had attended French, urban elementary School B. Again,
this school had the biggest disparity in size from the elementary to the junior high school;
it was the smallest of the elementary immersion schools and fed into a large junior high
school on a crowded urban campus with a senior high school. AnneMarie’s repeated
insistence on choosing “a smaller school” for her junior high clearly referenced this point.
A different non-continuing female from the same school made the same statement as
AnneMarie, saying that she also would have continued with immersion if it had been
194 featured in a smaller school because, as she said, “I actually, I really like French.” A
continuing female enrolled in the immersion continuation program at Program B’s junior
high school, when I asked her why other students did not continue, said that, “It was just
because they wanted to go to a smaller school.” Clearly, the size disparity between
School B and the junior high school housing the immersion program were foremost in
these students’ minds. Interestingly, although for Program A the size disparity between
the elementary immersion school and the junior high school housing the immersion
continuation program was quite different, this same issue was brought up by a non-
continuing student from School A (Spanish, urban), which fed into the same school as
School B but with a different language immersion strand. She also cited the fact that the
junior high school was “really really big,” saying “I didn’t really want to go to a huge
school like that, so that was pretty much the main reason.”
As noted, there were also considerable racial and socioeconomic differences
between elementary Schools A and B and the junior high school housing their immersion
continuation programs. It is interesting that the students cited above focused only on the
size disparity, and did not make any comments about any other differences between the
schools. Although I did not ask these students directly about their race in the survey or
the interview, it is important to note that these students all had the physical appearance of
being of European-American (White) heritage. I question here if these students chose to
focus on the school’s size because it was more socially acceptable than talking about race
or class. In doing this, they could explain their choices without having to address more
controversial or taboo concepts in their discussions with me. I do not think that one can
195 eliminate the possibility that these students also considered the demographic differences
in their objections to the schools housing the continuation programs; the term “size,” in
this case, could possibly have meant a great deal more.
Bonilla-Silva and Forman (2000), in an article entitled, “‘I am not a racist but…’:
mapping White college students’ racial ideology in the USA,” argued that overt
discussions of racial issues have become taboo, and that their White respondents avoided
terms related to race by using semantic moves to save face. Nonetheless, the authors felt
that they could identify serious prejudices and harmful assigning of blame to Blacks on
the part of the Whites interviewed in the study. I believe that some of the statements
about school size cited above could be classified as “semantic moves” according to their
analysis. However, other statements made by my interviewees fell even more clearly into
this category. Although the primary topic of this study is not race or class, I believe that
race and class are always inherently a part of how everyone experiences the world, and
omitting them from an analysis because they are not my primary topic is a deeply flawed
gesture as a researcher. It is also worth mentioning that I identified the more overt
statements about race and class below not because of their frequency, but because of their
intensity and honesty. Even though only a few students mentioned reasons beyond “size”
that I felt were a slightly more overt gloss for socioeconomic or racial reasons for the
undesirability of the middle/junior high school continuation programs, I feel that most
students might have been reluctant to even broach that subject in the interviews.
One of the non-continuing students from School E (Spanish, suburban) made a
powerful statement that seemed to reflect a consideration of racial and socioeconomic
196 demographics in her choice of school. To review, Program E features a notable
demographic shift from the elementary to the middle school housing the immersion
program, with five times more free/reduced lunch recipients and a significantly higher
amount of racial diversity as well. One female student (who was being homeschooled at
the time of the interview) reflected on this, stating:
There was a lot of different reasons why [I left], not so much that I didn’t want to
learn Spanish any more. It was just the school environment I guess, in middle
school…there was lots of other neighborhood kids coming in, and it was just not
as safe, or there was lots of bad language, and other things like that.
This quote is interesting in that the immersion elementary school and the middle school
housing the immersion program in this particular district shared one building and one
campus; as such, the contrast in “school environment” could not have been so vastly
different, particularly when compared with continuation programs housed in completely
separate buildings in different parts of town (as was the case in Schools A and B). One
can then look at what the student says about things not being as safe, or having more
“neighborhood kids.” This school was located on the edge of a poverty-stricken and
largely Black-inhabited neighborhood of the metro area. As the demographics about
School E show, the students “coming in” to the building for middle school were most
likely poorer and more non-White than the students in the immersion program. Clearly,
for this student, the marked difference in demographics between the elementary
immersion school and the middle school housing the continuation program were a factor
in her lack of desire to continue with the immersion program.
197
Some minor indicators of poverty also affected the students, like the student from
School B cited earlier, who mentioned that the junior high school was “dirty.” A
different non-continuing student from School E mentioned that she would not consider
attending a high school in the district because it was “poor.” Yet another non-continuing
student from School E mentioned that he would tell the continuing students that his
school was cooler “because it has a pool.” Crime affected the students profoundly, as
this student also brought up a memory of a bomb scare generated by a student in the
middle school. These issues were not confined to students from School E, as a
continuing student from School B told the story of experiencing a “lockdown” in his
junior high school due to the fact that someone had brought a gun to the school. He
prefaced this story with the comment, “At least in my [elementary] school, the parents
were reminded to help the kids a lot… and I think the lack of support from parents is one
of the reasons why people misbehave.” This collection of quotes serves to illustrate the
fact that the immersion graduates were very aware of factors in the continuation
programs beyond mere size or middle/junior high school culture. Although these
statements clearly indicate that there was something there with regard to the students’
appraisals of the demographic differences between their elementary immersion programs
and the middle/junior high schools housing the continuation programs, this topic would
certainly merit from more investigation, perhaps with the analytical lens of critical
discourse analysis, in another study.
Finally, it is important to mention that some non-continuing students gave much
more straightforward reasons for why they did not prefer the school housing the
198 immersion continuation program: it did not have the educational program that they
wanted. Non-continuing students from all of the schools frequently expressed their
preferences for other programs, particularly specialized or selective educational
programs, in their decisions to leave the immersion program. A non-continuing female
from School D (Spanish, suburban) said that she enrolled in an alternative school
“because they had the IB program, and that’s more advanced;” another non-continuing
male from School E (Spanish, suburban) wanted “an IB school” and “woodworking;” and
a non-continuing male from School A (Spanish, urban) said that he “really wanted to go
to a technology school.” Students who chose home-schooling stated that it had “more
flexible scheduling” and “we can learn what we want to learn” (non-continuing male
from Spanish, suburban School D), and that “you can get to do more of what you want to
do” (non-continuing female from Spanish, suburban School E). This echoes what Lewis
and Shapson (1989) found in their study of secondary French immersion students in
Canada who had left their program: “leaving the program to take another program” was
identified as one of the three top descriptive profiles of transfer students (p. 545). Again,
non-continuing students from all five schools in this study made similar statements. This
suggests that the decision to leave the immersion program, when based on factors related
to the schools involved, did not always automatically signify a moving away from the
middle/junior high school housing the continuation program. Sometimes, it was more of
a movement toward another schooling option.
In conclusion, the elementary immersion environment for many of the student
interviewees was one of intimacy and community, with close relationships formed with
199 their teachers that perhaps were sometimes constrictive but were generally warm and
companionable. The middle/junior high school environment, however, seemed to present
a new set of considerations and challenges for some of them. The students who had left
programs with more differences between the elementary school environment and the
middle/junior high school environment, like Schools B and E, talked overtly about school
size and middle/junior high school culture as important factors in their decisions to
choose other schooling options. Some students from those schools talked more covertly
about issues related to racial and socioeconomic differences between the two schools. In
all of the programs, however, non-continuing students were also tempted away from the
immersion program by other programs, including IB and technology programs, in other
schools or in homeschooling environments.
Bandura (1997) called the transition from elementary to middle-level schools a
“major environmental change that taxes personal efficacy” (p. 178). A study conducted
with the theoretical framework of the L2 Motivational Self System (Csizér & Kromos,
2009) has further suggested that younger students are more affected in their L2 learning
motivation by their learning environment than older students. Clearly, this change had
the potential to greatly affect some of the students’ motivation to learn the language of
their immersion program. Because the continuation program was not attractive to the
students, they chose to stop putting their energy in a different direction, away from their
L2 learning. It is clearly vital for issues of school environment to be considered in a
study of language learning motivation, particularly in the immersion context.
200
Conclusion
In this section, I explored the immersion graduates’ attitudes toward the learning
situation, first by looking at how they evaluated their teachers, and then by looking into
another learning-situation-related factor that emerged from the qualitative data: the factor
of overall school environment, particularly the shift in school environment between the
elementary immersion school and the middle/junior high school housing the immersion
continuation program. Although I was unable to include any quantitative data for these
factors due to the unique immersion context, it was clear that both of teachers and school
environment were important to the student participants in the program. Additionally, a
clear connection could be made between students’ persistence in the program and their
consideration of the change in the school environment from elementary to middle/junior
high school, suggesting the inclusion of this factor in the motivation construct might
result in a more successful and conclusive way to link motivation and persistence for
programs like the ones examined in this study. Finally, a number of important
implications for immersion programs come to light given this analysis. One important
implication is that the districts involved in establishing and maintaining immersion
programs should work harder to establish that these programs reflect the district’s
demographics as much as possible. Examining the differences between the elementary
and middle/junior high schools housing the immersion programs could also be very
useful. I discuss these implications at greater length in Chapter Six.
201
Conclusion
What exists at the crossroads of motivation and persistence in immersion
programs? Why do some students stay in immersion programs, and some leave, and is it
related to their language learning motivation? As shown in the case studies of Carlos and
AnneMarie, it can be difficult to predict how and why a student might leave an
immersion program, and the relationship between the students’ L2 learning motivation
and their persistence in the immersion program might not be completely straightforward.
Through a mixed methods analysis of students’ attitudes about immersion language
learning, language learning anxiety, parental and peer influence, and attitudes toward the
learning situation, a few important conclusions can be drawn that can help elucidate the
nature of language learning motivation in this context.
Negative student attitudes toward learning a language did not necessarily have a
strong impact on the immersion graduates’ decision to persist in immersion education,
and motivation, anxiety, and persistence in immersion for this population were not linked
in the quantitative or qualitative data. The immersion graduates did seem to be
influenced by their parents and their teachers in their L2 learning motivation to a certain
extent, but their decisions to persist in the immersion program were more based on peer
influence and their assessments of the school environment of the immersion continuation
program than any other factor. The socio-educational model provided a useful
framework for approaching these important issues, but the complexities and
contradictions of the negotiations of identity taking place for many of these immersion
graduates often outstripped the static, ahistorical nature of motivation in this model. The
202 secondary theoretical frameworks provided in the work on self-efficacy and attribution
theory, as well as the notion of investment and Dörnyei’s L2 Motivational Self System
allowed for a richer and deeper understanding of what was occurring among the
participants in this study.
203
CHAPTER FIVE: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION:
DEVELOPING CROSS-CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING
IN IMMERSION STUDENTS
Introduction
This chapter provides important insights into the research questions for this study.
RQ1: What contributes to the second language (L2) learning motivation of
elementary immersion program graduates? How do these motivating factors
interrelate?
I address this question in this chapter through addressing selected motivating
factors that relate to the chapter’s topic: developing cross-cultural understanding in
immersion education. Those motivating factors and related concepts, identified
deductively using the socio-educational model and inductively through a theme analysis
of the qualitative data, include: students’ received messages about culture,
integrativeness, and instrumentality. The case studies at the beginning of the chapter
provide an initial introduction to these relevant motivating factors and give an illustration
of how these motivating factors can interrelate for individual students. The statistical
correlations among the factors are referenced when possible in order to address how they
interrelate. Relationships between motivating factors in the qualitative data are traced
through the ideas and connections articulated by the students themselves.
RQ2: What does an examination of the L2 learning motivation of early adolescent
immersion graduates reveal about important issues in immersion education, such as: (a)
204 Issues about the development of cross-cultural understanding in immersion students?
As discussed in Chapter Two, it is generally agreed among immersion researchers
and practitioners that immersion programs in the United States aim to have students
“learn about and understand the culture(s) of the people who speak the immersion
language” (Met & Lorenz, 1997, p. 259), or, in a more general sense, to give them
“enhanced levels of intercultural sensitivity” (Fortune & Tedick, 2008, p. 10). However,
from the beginning of immersion education research, scholars have argued and provided
evidence that these goals have been difficult to meet. Since one aspect of this difficulty
certainly relates to the difficulty in defining what “cross-cultural understanding” or
“intercultural sensitivity” might actually look like in an immersion student, addressing
this topic in this study, using a culture-oriented model for L2 learning motivation like the
socio-educational model, might help shed light on this corner of the immersion research
field.
I selected the students for the two case studies that begin this chapter specifically
based on their representativeness of ideas related to the development of cross-cultural
understanding in immersion students. In the next section of the chapter devoted to
investigating motivational factors, I selected factors in the socio-educational model and
further themes that emerged through the interviews that would be particularly useful in
addressing the issue of developing cross-cultural understanding. For each factor, I
explain how prior research and/or the nature of the data connects it to the issue. Next, I
discuss the quantitative and qualitative results related to each factor in order to examine
how the motivating factor might affect the development of cross-cultural understanding
205 in these immersion students.
RQ3: In what ways do the data collected through student interviews provide
insight into the data generated by the results of the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery?
I address this question throughout this chapter by holding the quantitative and
qualitative results constantly in comparison. The presentation of the case studies
integrates the data from the two sources by using it to create a rich and detailed
description of the student (Merriam, 1998). Then, for each motivating factor discussed in
the chapter, I begin by presenting the quantitative results. I offer possible interpretations
for those results without considering the qualitative data. When I introduce the
qualitative data, I examine how it can offer insight into the interpretation of the
quantitative results. Additionally, I allow the qualitative data to lead to new paths of
inquiry about the motivating factor or related concepts, and I examine how those new
paths can be used to more adequately investigate the language learning motivation of the
students in the context of this study.
Two Case Studies
As with Chapter Four, I begin this chapter with the case studies of two immersion
graduates whom I interviewed, and whom I believe present important insights into the
topical framework addressed in the chapter. I selected these two students because they
both reflected on some important issues related to developing cross-cultural
understanding in immersion students, both directly in relation to the construct of
motivation in the socio-educational model, but also in terms of themes that I saw emerge
in other interviews. Again, I have examined all data sources for these individual mini
206 case studies, including the student surveys, the parent surveys, and the student interviews.
As I continue my analysis in this chapter, I will return to the rich descriptions of these
students to provide guiding illustrations of the themes that I am developing.
Case Study 1: Kaley
Kaley was a continuing student from Spanish, suburban School D. From the
survey filled out by her parents, she did not seem to have a great number of experiences
with the target culture; like 43.5% of the survey respondents, she had been outside of the
United States 1-3 times, although in the interview, she stated that her sole voyage was a
trip to Canada. Beyond that, she lived in a monolingual English environment at home.
Only a few experiences in her home background indicated exposure to other languages
and cultures, as she had some contact with family members who lived outside of the
United States and at least one experience with a foreign exchange student living with her
family.
I interviewed Kaley during a study hall period at her school, and after I met her at
her classroom, we chatted comfortably on the way to the library, where we had the
interview in a small, private conference room. In our interaction before, during, and after
the interview, I found Kaley to be very friendly, smiling, and at ease with me. She gave
an honest feeling of self-assuredness and comfort in her own skin as we spoke.
I was intrigued early in our conversation by Kaley’s perspective because of her
answer to my first question, “Tell me something that you like about learning in Spanish.”
Kaley answered:
207
Well, it gives you lots of opportunities in the future. Because I want to travel
when I’m older, [and] it can help me with that. I don’t want to be a stranger in a
strange place. I will have already studied all the languages and all the countries
that speak Spanish, so I will sort of know it in a way, if I travel to there.
These positive reasons for learning a language align with the concept of integrativeness
from the socio-educational model. Kaley wished to be able to successfully understand
the target culture(s), and her statement about not wanting to be a “stranger in a strange
place” shows that she also wanted to become a part of the community if possible. She
was clearly concerned with relating to members of the target community, including
Spanish-speaking individuals in the United States. Later in the interview, she spoke
about not wanting to “disrespect” people who only speak Spanish, using an interesting
parallel circumstance from her studies to illustrate her feelings: “the Dakotas didn’t feel
like the Germans were nice neighbors because they wouldn’t learn their language.”
Kaley wanted to go beyond the world of the classroom in other ways as well. At
several moments in our conversation, she expressed her desire to become a world
traveler, despite her lack of prior travel experience. She stated that she not only wanted
to travel to Spain (“I’ve seen so many movies with Spain in it and…it just seems so
beautiful there, and it would be like warm all the time, and their food is really good”); but
also Argentina (“It sounds really cool down there, it’d be really close to the ocean”),
Egypt (“I’m obsessed”), and France (“I really like that language too”). She wanted to be
able to study French, German, and Arabic. She was one of the only students from School
D who expressed displeasure with the immersion continuation program’s policy that
208 immersion students could not take another language. Interestingly, Kaley responded
quite a bit more positively on the questions on the modified AMTB on the “Interest in
world languages” subscale than she did on the “Integrative orientation” subscale. Where
a -2 response strongly disagrees with positive statements about integrative orientation and
2 strongly agrees, she had a mean score of 1.71 on the “Interest in world languages”
subscale, versus a .66 on the “Integrative orientation” subscale. Since the “Integrative
orientation” subscale included statements only focused on the target culture(s), the
quantitative data support the qualitative data in that Kaley’s motivation reflected an
interest in not just the target culture(s), but also in other cultures and languages.
Kaley told several stories about using Spanish outside of the classroom. Most of
these stories centered on interactions that she had had with members of the Spanish-
speaking community. She spoke about how her mother went with her to a well-known
Spanish market in the area and asked her to speak Spanish to the people working there.
Kaley found that experience “embarrassing” and “a little bit weird,” although a similar
experience at her grandma’s small town, where “half of the population is Hispanics,” led
to feelings of pride. Kaley was happy that she could speak in Spanish with people
working at a fast food taco chain, since “barely anyone speaks English there” because
“Hispanics can’t get very many good jobs.” She was able to recall several distinct
interactions with Spanish-speaking people in the United States, and it seemed like these
interactions were not always purely for pragmatic reasons; she saw those opportunities to
communicate as ways to make connections with individuals, not just as a way to get what
she wanted. This is not to say that Kaley never spoke about using Spanish in a pragmatic
209 way; she liked to show off how much Spanish she knew around students who were not in
the immersion program by saying “something really complicated and they won’t have
any idea of what I just said,” so that others would say, “Oh my gosh, that person should
be respected because she knows so much!” Kaley thought that this type of interaction
was “really kind of cool in a way.” Kaley’s mean score on the “Attitudes toward the
target community” subscale, at .625, was similar to her score on the “Integrative
orientation” subscale but less than her score on the “Interest in world languages”
subscale. The quantitative data thus suggest that Kaley’s interest in world languages was
still the foremost factor in her integrativeness, although the other two indicator variables
were certainly contributors as well.
Despite her somewhat pejorative comment about Hispanics being unable to get
good jobs, Kaley did not characterize all Spanish-speaking people in this way during our
conversation. When I asked her about people who speak Spanish as their first language,
she said:
They wear different clothes and they listen to different music. Last year, we had a
girl who used to be a teacher at a different school [in Uruguay], and we looked at
the uniforms of that school and we were horrified. Like really big, frilly
clothes…some people drink mate, and I tried it and it tastes like dirt to me. But
[they] love it! …They shop at different stores, like not Abercrombie and stuff,
like most people our age do, they shop at like South Pole and stuff.
Although none of these observations were particularly insightful, these statements
revealed a number of things about Kaley. First of all, she was clearly able to identify a
210 number of different aspects to culture, including clothing, activities, and food. Secondly,
she noticed differences between her own culture and those of other people. Even though
she risked over-generalization here, she saw difference where difference existed. I found
that she was often the exception in this sense, as will be shown in the rest of this chapter.
Even though Kaley’s home background characteristics did not indicate that she
was particularly well-traveled or exceptionally exposed to other languages and cultures in
her life outside of school, she clearly had been able to make some important connections
with members of the target community, and she had cultivated her own interests
accordingly. Ultimately, during our conversation, I found that Kaley displayed a great
deal of integrativeness, particularly in that she was very interested in world languages and
people from the target community. The quantitative data from the AMTB support these
observations, although they also suggest that Kaley’s interest in world languages was
considerably more positive than her integrative orientation or her attitudes toward the
target community. I observe an interesting interplay here between the more dynamic and
multifaceted notion of motivation apparent in the interview, and the more static notion
resulting from a consideration of the quantitative results; this will be addressed again
later in this chapter.
Case Study 2: Thomas
Thomas was a continuing student from Spanish, suburban School E. He shared a
number of home background characteristics with Kaley, notably in that he had very little
exposure to other languages and cultures in his home. He had never traveled outside of
the United States, and he lived in a monolingual English home environment. Unlike
211 Kaley, he had no family outside of the United States, and he had never had someone from
a Spanish-speaking country come to stay with his family. The parent who filled out his
parent survey wrote long responses to the open-ended questions, effusive in his/her praise
of the teachers and the immersion program. The parent did acknowledge that Thomas
had faced some difficulty with learning English from second to fourth grades, but he/she
concluded that Thomas “is doing much better now in middle school.”
Interviewing Thomas was a different experience from interviewing Kaley.
Thomas sometimes seemed uncomfortable with me, and he was not particularly talkative,
often giving a simple, quiet, polite “yes” or “no” as his response to my questions.
Nonetheless, he still was quite thoughtful with me, and he was forthcoming about his lack
of interest in certain areas, apparently preferring to be honest rather than worrying about
giving a certain answer that an adult might expect.
Thomas did not differ in every respect from Kaley, however. Like her, he had a
story about coming in contact with members of the target culture in United States. He
explained:
I had to translate for this one person because they didn’t speak that much English.
You had to sign [a waiver] to play [baseball]…they didn’t know what the form
said because they didn’t speak much English, because they came from Puerto
Rico.
Unlike Kaley, this was the only time that Thomas could remember speaking Spanish with
someone from a Spanish-speaking community outside of the classroom; when I asked
him about whether or not he had ever been particularly nervous or proud about the fact
212 that he could speak Spanish, he returned to this one incident every time. I do imagine
that Thomas had used Spanish outside of the classroom more than that one time, but it is
important that it was the only moment that he was able to actively recall during our
interview. Thomas’ responses on the “Attitudes toward the target community” subscale
were actually slightly negative, with a mean of -.125.
Although Thomas liked to present himself as an expert in Spanish in front of his
monolingual English peers (“It’s sometimes fun to talk with your [immersion] friends
because [other friends] don’t know what you’re saying”), he was not necessarily always
well-informed about the Spanish language and culture(s). When I asked him, “Is there
something about Spanish as opposed to a different language that is good [to know]?”, he
replied, “It’s similar to English so it’s not as hard to learn its verbs. Like
German…doesn’t sound anything like English.” Although this error about language
families certainly is not egregious, I believe it hints at a deeper lack of knowledge about
the nature of language. This is supported by another statement that Thomas made during
our interview, this time about how his teachers learned language:
My teachers, they would go to some Spanish-speaking place for two years, and
then they would learn the language, without taking classes or anything. They
would just go with somebody else, and they would help them through stuff…so
they’d have to talk Spanish for a whole two years. So that’s how they learned to
speak Spanish.
When I questioned him further about this, Thomas said that this was the case for all of his
native English-speaking teachers; that only “one or two” teachers grew up speaking
213 Spanish. One can conclude from this that Thomas did not have a great number of close
relationships with his teachers or aides, given the profoundness of this misunderstanding.
This part of Thomas’ interview is particularly important when considering how cross-
cultural understanding is developed in immersion graduates. Thomas made no attempt to
address the fact that his Spanish immersion teachers were supposed to be well-versed in
both language and culture, nor did he acknowledge other aspects of the target
community, like the fact that there are so many different cultures associated with
speaking the Spanish language. Perhaps not surprisingly, Thomas had very little interest
in traveling, saying, “I’m not really into traveling a lot, just going up north and fishing
and stuff.” Although one must be careful when comparing means of ordinal Likert-scale
data, his response mean contrasted sharply with the overall mean regarding questions
relating to interest in other world languages: his mean was 0.14, compared to an overall
respondent mean of 1.22.
So, if Thomas did not have many accurate or profound reflections on Spanish-
speaking people or cultures, what were some important factors that kept him engaged
with his immersion education? When I asked him why he chose to continue, he
responded:
Because my parents told me that would be good for college because you wouldn’t
have to learn a different language…Like my dad, he just went to an English
school? And so he learned German, and he had to go through a bunch of classes
to learn German.
214 Thomas saw learning a language in immersion school as a good opportunity to avoid
language study in the future. Later in the interview, he clarified: “you would know
another language so you wouldn’t have to go through high school learning another
language,” and, again, in response to the question, “Do you think it’s good to know
Spanish?”: “so you don’t have to go through classes.” As such, I would categorize
Thomas’ responses as primarily reflecting an instrumental orientation, and somewhat
related to the concept of investment as well. He clearly saw knowing Spanish as a
pragmatic resource to access benefits like placing out of language classes. When I
prompted him to expand beyond this, asking directly about where he could use Spanish,
he spoke immediately about “Almost any job I think,” including “President,” “phone
operator,” “working at a concession stand,” “engineer” or “architect.” Again, he did not
mention anything involving making connections with the target community.
Therefore, Thomas, though sharing some home background characteristics with
Kaley, clearly showed a different orientation and a relative lack of cross-cultural
understanding. He displayed an underdeveloped knowledge of the nature of learning
about other languages and cultures. His justifications for his immersion study involved
avoiding future curricular obligations, combined with a minor interest in accessing the
linguistic capital that could later be used pragmatically in a job environment. I consider
Thomas to be an illustration of the fact that cross-cultural understanding, although
sometimes clearly developed as in Kaley’s case, is not always a given outcome of
immersion education. Sometimes students came out of the program motivated by other
215 factors, ones perhaps not as customarily identified as primary goals of immersion
education.
Discussion
Kaley’s and Thomas’ cases demonstrate that immersion graduates do not all come
out of the elementary program with the same awareness or consideration of the target
language and culture(s) that they have been studying in for many years. Even when the
students had a great deal in common in terms of their home background characteristics,
as did Kaley and Thomas, they still could differ quite a bit. Whereas Kaley had a deep
interest in traveling and making connections with members of the target culture, Thomas
seemed at best indifferent and at most actively uninterested in those aspects of being a
Spanish-speaker. When prompted, he only thought of instrumental, pragmatic reasons
for learning a language. Kaley, on the other hand, talked about not wanting to be a
“stranger in a strange place” while traveling, indicating a clear desire to get closer to the
target community. Furthermore, her intense expressions of interest in learning other
languages indicated that she was also motivated to learn beyond the scope of the
immersion program. In this chapter, therefore, I will address some of the important
issues relating to developing cross-cultural understanding in immersion students brought
up in the mini case studies about Kaley and Thomas. Their similarities as well as their
differences will serve as an introduction to three main themes in the data: students’
received messages about culture(s), their integrativeness, and their instrumentality.
One final note: it is important to remember here that Kaley, Thomas, and the other
participants in this study were early adolescents. Many theories on early adolescent
216 development have posited that from the ages of 10-15, young people go through a
complete reexamination of themselves, their identities, and their relationships with others
and the world (Stevenson, 1998; Bandura, 1997). As such, other cultures, people, and
communities naturally undergo additional scrutiny and sometimes negative judgment that
might not occur in the minds of either younger or older learners. Furthermore, one must
also consider that the participants in this study have not necessarily studied a curriculum
in elementary or early middle/junior high school that asked them to reflect in depth on the
meaning of culture. Therefore, their answers must be contextualized by both their
developmental stage and their educational experiences. I will return to this throughout
this chapter, as it affects my interpretation of the data throughout.
Students’ Received Messages about Culture(s)
I’d really like to see the different cultures, you know? Just see how different
things are, how the food’s different, how the atmosphere’s different…It just gets
like collecting a snow globe or something. You get all these different kinds of
snow globes from different places, and you can see the difference. Some have
brighter colors, and some of them are more modern or classical… (continuing
female from Spanish, suburban School D)
A study by Wright (1999) about foreign language student attitudes towards
culture suggested that it is not only important to look at what students’ attitudes actually
are, but also what the perceived influences on those attitudes might be. As seen
particularly in Thomas’ case, immersion graduates can and do have very mistaken ideas
about the target language and culture(s), and they can base other assumptions on that
217 knowledge. Many scholars in the traditional non-immersion L2 (foreign language)
context have investigated the role of culture learning in the L2 classroom, and the idea
that students have pre-formed and many times incorrect ideas about other cultures
(Clavijo, 1984; Mantle-Bromley, 1995; Morgan, 1993). In the immersion context, Van
der Kielen (1995) suggested that one-way Canadian immersion students did not develop a
sufficient “familiarity with the values, mentality and culture of the other group” in the
classroom, so immersion programs should consider the encouragement of cultural
exchanges (1995, p. 302). One study by Dagenais (2008) addressed the idea that
immersion students have often had some incorrect assumptions about languages that
could be investigated in more detail through programs about language awareness.
Beyond that, the few studies that have addressed the development of cross-cultural
understanding in the immersion context have not approached the issue of what, exactly,
has been taught about culture in the immersion classrooms (Bearse & de Jong, 2008;
Campbell, 1984; Swain & Lapkin, 1982; Lambert & Gardner, 1992; Lapkin et al., 1990).
Importantly for this study, the non-culture-specific nature of the modified AMTB
did not contain questions asking respondents about what they actually knew or believed
about the target culture(s), rather, it focused on their general outlook on the target
culture(s). In focusing on general thoughts and attitudes, the AMTB allowed students to
define culture however they preferred, leaving open the possibility that their definitions
may have been misguided. As shown in Chapter Four, the immersion graduates defined
language learning in the immersion context in many and varied ways, not all of which
218 reflected the pedagogical foundations of immersion education; it is possible that similar
misunderstandings might occur with the concept of culture.
Thus, in this section, I investigate how the students defined culture in the
interviews, and where they indicated that their definitions originated. It serves two
primary purposes in this study, despite not being a direct investigation of a factor in L2
learning motivation per se. First, this topic describes some of the ways in which
immersion graduates are (or are not) developing cross-cultural understanding from their
experiences, whether that is their school curriculum or their travel experiences. It is
worth emphasizing that I am focusing on received messages rather than what exactly is
taught in the immersion classroom. Immersion researchers have argued that the
integration of culture objectives into a curriculum that already must meet, integrate, and
counterbalance content and language objectives has been a serious and unmet challenge
in immersion education in the United States (Lyster, 2007; Met & Lorenz, 1997). This
section is not a review of pedagogical or curricular decisions in immersion programs,
although it might offer some insights into how some of these decisions might be made in
the future to better set and meet program goals. Second, the topic provides a means of
identifying the assumptions underlying the definitions of the motivational factors in the
socio-educational model more related to the target culture(s), notably integrativeness,
thus laying the foundation for later identification and analysis of the immersion
graduates’ L2 learning motivational factors.
219
Culture Lessons from School
One widely-accepted definition of culture, according to the Standards for Foreign
Language Learning in the 21st Century (1999) developed by the American Council on the
Teaching of Foreign Languages, references three main cultural components: products,
defined as books, tools, foods, laws, music, and games; practices, or patterns of social
interactions; and perspectives, or meanings, attitudes, values, and ideas (p. 47). At
several different points during the interview, I gave students an opportunity to reflect on
the target culture(s), however they decided to define it. As we have seen, the first
questions that I asked in the interview were about the respondents’ favorite and least
favorite things about learning in the target language. Some students took this opportunity
to talk about the target culture(s). More commonly, we discussed culture more near the
end of the interview, when I asked students to tell me about people who spoke the target
language. I often followed up on this question by asking students to explain to me how
French or Spanish-speaking people or culture is different from American, English-
speaking culture.
The immersion graduates sometimes resorted to very simple definitions of
culture, as the introductory quote about “snow globes” demonstrates. The quote indicates
a certain impression of culture as unchanging and isolated from other cultures. Some
students defined culture purely in terms of language. Perhaps the most simplistic cultural
distinction made by the interviewees was that people from the target culture spoke the
target language: “They don’t really speak English” (continuing female from Spanish,
suburban School E). Many limited their definitions of cultural practices to the traditional
220 foreign language student category of “holidays.” As one continuing female from School
D (Spanish, suburban) said, as an explanation of how she learned about culture: “At [the
elementary immersion program] we celebrated a lot of things like Cinco de Mayo, we
had like big celebrations and stuff.” A non-continuing female from School E (Spanish,
suburban) said: “You get to learn a lot about other cultures that you wouldn’t learn a lot
about normally at other schools. You learn about their holidays because it’s Spanish
holidays.” The fact that even just a few of these students had had so many years of
education in the target language, yet still essentialized culture to mean language or
celebrations of holidays, was surprising.
Other students expanded their comments to cultural practices beyond celebrations
and holidays. A continuing female from School D (Spanish, surburban) said: “I’ve
learned how they eat and how the weather is, and what’s their daily routine and stuff.” A
continuing female from School C (French, suburban) said:
When you learn a language you learn what they eat [and] how they do stuff. I
know in France they walk a lot more than we do, like they’ll walk to certain
places a lot more. I wouldn’t have really known that, unless I was in the French
program.
Similarly, a continuing female from School E (Spanish, suburban) said: “You get to learn
about different cultures and how they live with their Spanish lives...they have different
lifestyles like different houses and jobs.” The references to “daily life” in the target
culture(s) mirrors “culture” as defined by ACTFL as “everyday life and social
institutions” (National Standards, 1999, p. 34). However, not every student made
221 comments like this, and those that were made never addressed the rest of the ACTFL
definition: “contemporary and historical issues that are important in those cultures, about
significant works of literature and art, and about cultural attitudes and priorities” (1999,
p. 34). One could argue that not all of these parts of the definition of culture can easily be
addressed with elementary or early middle/junior high school students, but it is
undeniable that a knowledge of these other aspects of culture are crucial to developing
cross-cultural understanding in the immersion students.
In conclusion, many of the interviewees struggled with articulating sophisticated
definitions of culture or describing complex components of the target culture, although
their descriptions of what they learned about culture in immersion school were not
universally shallow or based on false assumptions. The fact that there was a range of
statements about culture lessons from school suggests that, for these early adolescents in
these one-way immersion programs in the United States, the influence of the immersion
curriculum was in itself insufficient to develop their cross-cultural understanding. Note
also that the students cited in this section did not fall into groupings according to their
immersion schools; students from the same schools had different ways of describing the
concept of “culture,” even when they had ostensibly experienced very similar curricula in
their school. Furthermore, these data also call into question the assumption that
respondents to the AMTB would have a similar and developed understanding of the
nature of the target community and culture(s). I would argue that this assumption made
by the AMTB might be problematic in a variety of settings beyond this study, given the
difficulty of defining and identifying a construct like culture.
222
Culture Lessons from Travel
Students did have the opportunity to learn about the target culture(s) in another
venue: that of a travel experience. Among my survey respondents, 70.2% of the parents
reported traveling outside of the United States with their child once or more, 3.8%
reported living outside of the United States with their child, and 16.8% reported that their
child had traveled outside of the United States without them (see Appendix A). Although
there was some overlap among these groups, these statistics certainly suggest that most of
the immersion graduates in my study had had some experience with traveling to other
countries, although they did not necessarily always travel to countries where the student’s
immersion target language was spoken, and in some cases, like Kaley’s, the travel might
have been somewhat inconsequential in the eyes of the student. One thing that travel
provided to these students was a chance to see other cultures outside of the controlled
environment of school. Negative and complex or ambiguous parts of other cultures could
become visible to them, when they customarily would be left out of an elementary
curriculum. Therefore, an examination of the students’ observations about elements of
other cultures during their travels can reveal a new dimension in how they understood
other cultures.
Some students made statements that showed a nuanced and varied insight into the
nature of other cultures as a result of travel experiences. One remarkable student in this
way was a young man who continued in the immersion program from School D (Spanish,
suburban). He had studied Hebrew in addition to Spanish, and, in speaking of his travels
to Israel and his favorite schwarma stand, he shared:
223
The thing I hate the most is tourist food. [In Israel], we were walking into
[famous landmark] and I was really hungry, and we didn’t have enough money
for the schwarma, so we had to get some falafel and it was a real tourist falafel,
and it tasted like crap…[You have to] always go to the center of the city.
This sophisticated understanding of culture and travel, not to mention the notion of
cultural authenticity, was somewhat unique, but it showed that some immersion graduates
were capable of developing interesting attitudes about culture largely from their travels.
Echoes of this can be identified in a statement made by a male continuing student from
School C (French, suburban), who said, as an example of something that he had heard
about from French-speaking aides: “…in some of the smaller towns [in France], they had
shopping malls outside, like markets. It was cool because we don’t really have many of
those besides the Farmer’s Market.” His observation, paired with a direct contrast with
American culture, indicates an insight into how life is lived in the other culture. Both of
these quotes, although coincidentally centered around food, reflected an understanding of
not just the products of the culture being visited (sandwiches, market products), but also
the practices (going to the center of the city, shopping in markets). Even an
understanding about perspectives on city and town life can be inferred from a reading of
these statements.
However, travel experiences did not always give the immersion graduates added
insight into the nature of the target culture(s). This is not to say that they were not
observant about what was happening around them. A non-continuing male from School
224 E spoke thusly about his trip to Mexico as a part of a parent-chaperoned trip for a science
competition:
The foods are very different…usually they’d have tacos, the cereal brands are
different, their laws are different, like you can’t drink energy drinks unless you’re
18 there…Normally it’s dangerous to walk outside your front door, and you have
to keep every door locked, even if you have a patio three stories high, you have to
keep that locked, up there.
This student learned some idiosyncratic facts about the Mexican culture from his travels.
His understanding of the culture was both a reflection of his perspective as an early
adolescent with a favorite drink (energy drinks), and of the part of the country that he
visited (the need for security in the city). He clearly focused on Mexican products (tacos,
different cereal brands, energy drinks), and his observations about practices (different
laws, necessary self-protection) showed little insight and great negativity. The idea of
another culture being repressive as well as dangerous was carried over for a few other
students in their travel experiences. A female continuing student from School E
(Spanish, suburban) visited Mexico with her family and commented, “I noticed that the
other kids rode in the back of trucks. And these people walk around in the streets selling
things, it was weird, I was like, they’re gonna get run over.” Again, this student
identified somewhat stereotypical Mexican products (pickup trucks, items sold in the
streets) and a shallow and negative depiction of practices (riding in the back of trucks,
selling things in the street).
225 As an additional source of information for these immersion students about the
nature of culture, travel provided them with insights that were sometimes poetic,
sometimes banal, and sometimes negative. It is important to remember here that these
early adolescents were at a stage in their lives when travel experiences and close contact
with other cultures might have seemed like more of a threat to their identities than an
opportunity. Later in this chapter, I discuss more implications of travel for these students,
particularly with regard to their attitudes about the target community. However, this
section again demonstrates that immersion students do not always display cross-cultural
understanding, even when, in this case, they have been given opportunities to travel and
experience another culture first-hand. Again, the assumption in the AMTB that
immersion students in this context would define culture or the target community
consistently has been shown to be problematic.
Conclusion
In a 1993 review of literature and think-piece, Morgan explored and summarized
research on how attitudes about “foreign language” cultures were brought about, and how
they could be changed. She focused on four major aspects of the communicative process
as sources of attitudes about culture: the presenter, the environment, the message, and the
audience in the L2 classroom. Her review of research in this area led her to the
conclusion that, in all educational contexts:
…pupils will have pre-formed ideas of other cultures and that these will affect
their ability to process additional information which might be proffered. In
addition there will be the norms of their own culture, and the cultural groups to
226
which they belong, which will help to provide the structuring of schemata and
beliefs (1993, p. 70).
She suggested that what she calls “pupil preconceptions” be explored, and that they be
allowed to voice their thoughts. This recommendation mirrored Dagenais’ (2008)
argument for a more explicit discussion of the nature of languages to occur specifically in
the immersion classroom, in a way that can counteract the misunderstandings like those
outlined above.
One of the more important points that can be gleaned from this investigation, as
well as from the case studies about Kaley and Thomas, is the fact that these students did
not receive the same messages about the target culture(s). They defined culture
differently and with different levels of sophistication based on the lessons that they had
learned in school. They experienced and observed culture differently and with different
levels of sophistication when they had the opportunity to travel to another country. This
variability in definition and experience of culture is probably representative of many
different groups of students in this age group. Early adolescents do not all develop at the
same rate, experiencing rapid physical, intellectual, and social change in the course of a
few years (Jackson & Davis, 2000). Despite the influence of social comparison within
peer groups, they all develop self-efficacy and other social cognitive traits at different
rates based on many factors (Bandura, 1997). Nonetheless, these data do seriously call
into question whether or not the goal of cross-cultural understanding in immersion
students is being reached by the schools included in this study, particularly since it seems
that some of the students clearly struggled both with the identification and the
227 interpretation of elements of the target culture(s). Furthermore, the assumption made in
the socio-educational model that culture would be defined consistently across a
respondent group is certainly called into question. As we look more into some of the
ways that language learning motivation has been constructed in the socio-educational
model, notably through the attributes of integrativeness and instrumentality, this
variability will help us to understand more about the challenges to developing cross-
cultural understanding in immersion students.
Integrativeness
Gardner has defined “integrativeness” as “an individual’s openness to taking on
characteristics of another cultural or linguistic group.” (Gardner, 2005, p. 7). On the
modified AMTB, it has been measured by items from three separate subscales: “Attitudes
toward the target community”; “Integrative orientation”; and “Interest in world
languages” (adapted from Gardner, 2001, Texas Papers, p. 10). Integrativeness thus
relates not just to attitudes about the target culture, but to all other cultures and to the
individual’s own ethnic identity. It can be connected conceptually to the “Ideal L2 Self”
in Dornyei’s L2 Motivational Self System, which he defines as “when the person that we
would like to become speaks an L2” (2009, p. 29). As argued in Chapter Two, this
particular aspect of the socio-educational model has been developed very well over the
years. Investigating this attribute in an integrated manner with qualitative findings is also
revealing, because addressing questions of identity and cross-cultural understanding can
be a very different enterprise in surveys and in interviews (see for example Bonilla-Silva
& Forman, 2000).
228 Table 5.1
Questions on the Modified AMTB Corresponding with the Three Subscales Associated
with Integrativeness
Integrative Orientation
Studying the [target] language can be important for me because it will make me feel more
comfortable with people who speak [target language].
Studying the [target] language can be important for me because it will help me to talk to
different kinds of people.
Studying [target language] can be important for me because then I can talk to other kids
who speak [target language].
Attitudes toward the Target Community
The more that I learn about [target language]-speaking people, the more I like them.
I like the [target language]-speaking people.
[Target language]-speaking people are really nice.
I would like to know more [target language]-speaking people.
I would like to get to know the [target language]-speaking people better.
Most [target language]-speaking people are friendly.
[Target language]-speaking people have interesting cultures.
The more I get to know [target language]-speaking people, the more I want to be fluent in
their language.
Interest in World Languages
I wish I could speak another language perfectly.
Studying a world language is enjoyable.
I would really like to learn a lot of world languages.
If I were visiting a foreign country, I would like to be able to speak the language of the
people.
I would study a world language in school even if it were not required.
It is important for Americans to learn world languages.
I enjoy meeting and listening to people who speak other languages.
Note. Questions adapted from Gardner (1985a).
229
Survey Responses: Three Subscales, Three Perspectives
The three subscales associated with integrativeness in the socio-educational
model have been, as mentioned above: “Attitudes towards the target community”;
“Integrative orientation”; and “Interest in world languages.” The questions in these three
subscales are included in Table 5.1. In this study, all of these subscales performed
predictably with regard to their correlation with other subscales in the AMTB, correlating
significantly at the .01 level (2-tailed) with all other subscales with the exception of the
anomalous “Anxiety about learning language” subscale. The responses to the questions
in each of the three subscales were coherent: a Cronbach’s alpha calculation of .884 for 8
items for “Attitudes toward the target community;” .544 for 3 items in “Integrative
orientation;” and .787 for 7 items in “Interest in world languages.”
In Table 5.2, we can see that the effects of home background characteristics on
the three subscales associated with integrativeness were quite disparate. As explained in
Chapter Two, computing effect sizes reveals trends in how different student
characteristics (for instance, French versus Spanish students) might have an effect on the
students’ responses in the subscales through accounting for the variance in the subscales.
I have also provided the standard deviations between the different characteristic groups as
additional illustration of the extent of the difference. Table 5.2 summarizes the different
groupings that produced effects on the variance in the three subscales. For instance, if
one considers the first row, it is shown that approximately 8.2 percent of the variation in
students’ responses to the “Interest in world languages” subscale could be attributed to
whether or not their parents had lived abroad. Students whose parents had lived abroad
230 Table 5.2
Effect Sizes of and Standard Deviation Differences among Select Student Attributes on
Three Subscales Associated with Integrativeness
Attitudes Toward the Target Community
Integrative Orientation
Interest in World Languages
Parents have lived abroad
ns ns 8.2% effect size “Yes” .75 SD > “No”
Family abroad ns ns 4% effect size “Yes” .5 SD > “No”
Relationship with family abroad
ns ns 6.5% effect size “Great deal of contact” .75 SD > “No family abroad”
Parent fluency in the target language
ns 4.4% effect size Parent TL fluency .5 SD > than none
ns
Gender 3.5% effect size “Female” .5 SD > “Male”
ns 4.8% effect size “Female” .5 SD > “Male”
Type of school ns ns 4.1% effect size “Urban” .5 SD > “Suburban”
ns = not significant
gave answers that were about three-quarters of a standard deviation more positive than
those whose parents had not lived abroad.
Clearly, “Interest in world languages” was the most affected by the different
groupings; it is noticeable that many of the groupings that affected this area were related
to factors about students’ sustained exposure to cultures in other countries, either through
parent influence or through family ties abroad. Also apparent is an echo of the statistics
231 that were observed in the “Attitudes toward learning the language” subscales, where
female students and students in urban schools generally seemed more positive about the
goals of immersion education. Note that there is no proof given by the statistical
procedures undertaken for the purposes of this study that these three subscales are not all
indicator variables for integrativeness; different procedures would need to be undertaken
to investigate this aspect of the socio-educational model statistically. That is, the
differences in the effect sizes for different home background characteristics in these three
subscales do not necessarily indicate that the three subscales should not be considered
together; they measure different aspects of integrativeness as defined in the socio-
educational model, which can be assessed in many ways (Gardner, 2005).
In conclusion, this quantitative analysis shows that the three indicator variables
for integrativeness, as defined in the socio-educational model, behaved more or less as
expected with regard to the correlations with the other subscales in the modified AMTB.
When considered in terms of home background characteristics, the three indicator
variables for integrativeness did not behave the same, however. Most notably, students
who had more exposure to other languages and cultures in some ways in their homes
were significantly more likely to display stronger interest in world languages. Students’
exposure to other languages and cultures in the home is thus an important element to
investigate in the qualitative data, particularly as it relates to how they discuss their L2
learning motivation. The connection of the concept of integrativeness with the
immersion goal of developing cross-cultural understanding in immersion students is
obvious, and it will be interesting to see if the relatively unsurprising quantitative
232 findings can be explored further in an analysis of the data representing a different
research paradigm.
Integratively Oriented Students, Traditionally and Not-So-Traditionally Defined
As in Kaley’s case, responses from some of the immersion students, representing
all of the schools in the study, often reflected what Gardner and his colleagues would
identify as clear integrative orientations, the indicator variable for integrativeness that
focuses on communication with members of the target language group (Gardner, 2005).
Students mentioned that knowing a language allowed you to “communicate with more
people” (non-continuing female from School D – Spanish, suburban) frequently in the
interviews as a reason why learning a language was good or important. This was often
linked with travel experiences. For instance, one continuing female from School C
(French, suburban) stated:
[I like] meeting new people who speak French, and I’m able to go to different
countries that speak French. Like I went to France, and I got to kind of do the
touring and everything. I got to talk to people and order at restaurants, and [in]
Africa, it kind of helped, too.
Other students mentioned the pleasure of being able to talk to “the locals,” (non-
continuing male from French, urban School B); or to “have a lot of fun with” Mexican
kids at a school (continuing male from Spanish, suburban School D).
Sometimes the ability to communicate with members of the language group was
not just an opportunity to meet or connect with others during travels, but also was overtly
connected to the idea of developing cross-cultural understanding for the students. For
233 instance, this non-continuing female from School B (French, urban) said, “Like maybe
you could help [people who speak the target language], if they need some
assistance…Then everyone can communicate better. So maybe there won’t be as many
arguments because people misunderstood each other.” This reason for learning a second
language demonstrates that some of the students that I interviewed were able to see
beyond merely the initial thrill of connecting with someone from another culture, to some
of the more considerable implications of such a connection. Similarly, a continuing male
from the same school articulated that he wanted to “just look at the language as you see
the world from a new perspective, from the perspective of a person and the culture that
the language belongs to.” Whether or not this student had specifically been instructed in
the definition of culture in the ACTFL Standards (1999), it is heartening to hear that
some immersion graduates did develop an understanding of the fact that culture is a
complex construct that is as much an issue of perspectives as it is of products and
practices.
In a qualitative pilot study for this research, I found that students often made
statements about the importance of learning a language that effectively and completely
combined traditional integrative and instrumental orientations (Wesely, 2009; see also
Lyons, 2009 for a similar finding framed in the L2 Motivational Self System). This same
dynamic was observable among my respondents in this study. For instance, a continuing
female from School B (French, urban) said, “If you learn a language when you’re
younger it will be easier for you, and maybe when you get older as a job, if somebody
doesn’t know much English, or more like Spanish or French, you can talk to them.” In
234 this quote, she started with a traditionally instrumental factor (a job) and then segued into
wanting to talk to someone who doesn’t know much English. A continuing male from
School E (Spanish, suburban) talked about his desire to study French, so that he could
“go to Paris…and cook for someone or open up a restaurant there, and it would be
interesting to speak with those people.” Again, the student started with the idea to fulfill
the instrumental functions of a job, but then concluded that he wanted to make a
connection with the people. These expressions of integrative orientations indicate that the
separation between integrative and instrumental orientations sometimes creates a false
dichotomy. As such, this analysis supports the recent emphasis by Gardner and his
colleagues on the interdependence of all of the attributes in the socio-educational model
(Gardner, 2001b; see also Wesely, 2009). The attribute of instrumentality is discussed in
more detail later in this chapter.
Being able to communicate with people from the target language group was
clearly a motivating factor for some of these students. The qualitative data thus support
the existence of integrative orientations in some of the language learners in this study.
Some, but not all, immersion graduates also showed a desire for more cross-cultural
understanding in their expressions of integrative orientations. Participants also explicitly
connected and combined their desire to communicate with target language speakers with
more instrumentally defined reasons like getting a job. I would argue, however, that the
students did not talk about reasons reflecting integrative orientations as vividly,
frequently, or with as much variation as they did more purely instrumental reasons. How
235 students addressed instrumental reasons is shown in the “Instrumentality” section of this
chapter; first, I explore the other aspects of students’ integrativeness.
Students’ Reflections on the Language Community
Unfortunately, qualitatively investigating the other indicator variables for
integrativeness as defined by the socio-educational model can present some difficulties,
largely due to the nature of questions that must be asked and the artificial environment
created by the interview structure. One important example of this: asking early
adolescent students what they think of people from other cultures is not extremely easy.
In my own experiences as a middle school teacher, I have found that early adolescents’
tendency to social conformity and the pressure to be politically correct about other
cultures tends to create an inherent lack of comfort about talking about other cultures.
Unlike my experience with Kaley, when I asked many students directly what they
thought about people from the target culture, they tended to offer statements like
“They’re friendly” (continuing female from School A – Spanish, urban); “It’s just that
they don’t speak English,” (non-continuing female from School E – Spanish, suburban);
“They have different names and stuff,” (continuing male from School E – Spanish,
suburban); “They’re all very kind and nice people” (non-continuing female from School
B – French, urban); or “I think we’re all the same” (continuing female from School D –
Spanish, suburban). For some of these students, this might have been an outgrowth of a
discomfort with the interviewing situation or talking about people from other cultures.
However, as we saw in the first part of this chapter, the interviewees in this study defined
and experienced culture in many different ways. The fact that some of these responses
236 lacked depth may have been a function of a limited understanding of cultural difference,
suggesting a true lack of reflection about the target community.
One important exception to this came from students when I asked about
individual relationships that they had been able to develop with members of the target
community. When students had created those relationships, they told vivid and detailed
stories that tended to reflect a sincere and developed understanding of the target
community. Most of these relationships had been formed through the contacts with
members of the target community that had occurred within the framework of the
immersion program. All of the elementary immersion schools were populated by
teachers and teachers’ aides from the target community; as shown in AnneMarie’s case,
some students housed those aides for a school year or longer. Ultimately, 60.3% of the
survey respondents reported having members of the target culture stay with them in their
home, including teachers’ aides (39.2% of those that had guests), exchange students
(12.6%), family friends (16.4%), or guests falling outside of those categories or fitting
more than one category (31.6%) (Appendix A). These statistics show that some contacts
with the target community directly involved the immersion program (the teachers’ aides),
but others did not. A closer examination of how the students fostered relationships with
members of the target community can show how it related or not to the development of
their cross-cultural understanding; it can also help explain the role that the immersion
programs played.
First, note that not all students were interested or experienced in developing
relationships with members of the target community. An illustration of the differences
237 that close contact with members of the target culture can have on students’ opinions
about the target community can be seen in a comparison of Kaley and Thomas. Thomas
had never had a member of the target community stay in his home, and he additionally
did not have much to say about his interactions with members of the target community
during our conversation. Although one cannot assume that one of these elements caused
the other, it is notable that Kaley, who had had foreign exchange students stay with her,
seemed to have many stories to tell about her teachers’ aides and other members of the
target community.
Thomas was not alone in his lack of expressed interest in the target community.
As shown in the discussion of the students’ received messages about culture, some
students were content to address cultural differences merely by saying that the members
of the target community speak a different language. Like Thomas, a continuing female
from School D (Spanish, suburban), in response to my question about the Spanish-
speaking country that she’d like to visit, simply said, “I dunno. Maybe…I’m not sure.”
These students, and others from all of the schools expressing similar sentiments, did not
have stories to tell about relationships with members of the target community in the
interviews.
In contrast, Kaley had had foreign exchange students stay with her, and she also
seemed to have many stories to tell about her teachers’ aides. As another example,
AnneMarie showed a great depth of understanding of the target community as a result of
her close experience with the aide that had lived in her house. A continuing female from
School D (Spanish, suburban), spoke excitedly and at length with me about her own
238 experiences with the target community, as a function of her relationship with an aide who
had lived with her friend. She explained, “My friend [hosted teacher aides] and I went
over to her house a lot. The [aide] and me and my friend, we became really good friends
and we went out for lunch and stuff, and it was really fun.” She continued to say, “we
started to become closer” and “[the aide] just had this really bright, funny, spunky
personality.” In reflecting on another aide, this student continued:
A bunch of [aides] I guess all have that kind of excitement, like last year one of
our [aides], it was the first time that she had seen snow. So the first thing that she
did was she ran outside and was rolling around in it…They’re just so amazed at
what this world is like, it’s like a whole different place to them, and it’s really
cool to see how different our world is from theirs.
Clearly, this student had had positive, rich experiences with the members of the target
community with whom she had come in contact. She went on to reflect about how the
aides described their lifestyles as farmers, and how those interactions helped her
understand more about the target culture.
Some students had the opportunity to get to know peers from the target
community here in the United States. In some immersion schools, particularly Spanish,
urban School A, this was a feature of the student and family population in the school,
where more than 45% of the student population had a Hispanic background. Carlos
explained:
A lot of people [in the immersion school] talk about their culture because a lot of
them have been to Mexico. We like to talk about from their experience what’s
239
Mexico like, and how they live there, and then move here and how it’s a really big
difference between those places…Because a lot of people I know have family in
Mexico, or were born in Mexico.
Carlos’ attitudes about members of the target community are a function of attending an
immersion school with a large Hispanic population. He clearly connects those
relationships with a deeper understanding of the culture (“how they live there, and then
move here and how it’s a really big difference between those places”). Another student
from School A, a non-continuing female, said, “My friend, she speaks Spanish, and she
likes to watch telenovelas which are like Mexican soap operas on TV, and she likes to
listen to Spanish bands and stuff.” It stands to reason that many of the Spanish
immersion students from this school called upon thoughts of their friends when they
thought of members of the target community, and, as with the previous instances, they
were able to display more complex knowledge and awareness of cultural products,
practices, and perspectives as a result.
Therefore, when students were able to create sustained and fulfilling relationships
with the members of the target community, either through their teachers or teachers’
aides, or relationships with peers from the target community (particularly for students
from School A), they seemed to have a better developed cross-cultural understanding.
This finding reflects the body of research in the field. Van der Kielen (1995), in her
study of elementary French immersion students in Canada, suggested that language
learning in an immersion program should never be assumed to be a “substitute for actual
contact that might allow shared experience and the development of familiarity with the
240 values, mentality and culture of the other group" (1995, p. 302). Such contact was clearly
made by some of the immersion graduates above, and in the cases cited, it resulted in
their development of an important measure of cross-cultural understanding.
Prior research outside of the immersion education context has supported the
contention that relationship building and truly interacting with members of the target
community promotes better understanding of, and in some cases better attitudes toward,
that community (Clément, Gardner & Smythe, 1977a; Kim, 2009; Wright, 1999). Kim
(2009), using the theoretical framework of the L2 Motivational Self System, argued that a
learner’s ideal L2 self must be aligned with their L2 life experiences in the target
community. Dörnyei (2005) has similarly argued that L2 learners use their imaginations
to create their ideal L2 selves, and that their imagined L2 community is “partly based on
[their] real-life experiences of members of the community/communities speaking the
particular L2 in question, and partly on [their] imagination” (2005, p. 102). The
implication here is not necessarily that a better attitude is formed through this exposure,
simply that a more developed understanding results, and that the formation of an ideal L2
self is more likely.
This finding departs from the quantitative data, in that there were very few
distinctions among groups of students (including students who had or had not had travel
or house guest experiences) in the subscale scores on the “Attitudes toward the target
community” on the AMTB. One possible explanation for this is related to the fact that I
had a difficult time getting many students to reflect on the target community during the
interviews. When asked general questions about the target community, many of the early
241 adolescents tended to be reticent about making meaningful statements. Since the AMTB
is composed solely of those types of general questions, it is possible that the students
experienced a similar desire to react simply and complacently. Similarly, another
interpretation offers that, as the first section of this chapter explored, the students defined
and experienced other cultures with very different levels of sophistication. When asked
about target language speakers or the target language culture, as they were in the
questions for this subscale (Table 5.2), they were asked to assess what the people and/or
the culture was like (“nice,” “friendly,” “interesting,” etc.). For students with simple,
product-oriented definitions of culture, responding to these questions would be easy, even
if their understanding of the culture was not as developed as those of other students.
Finally, as Van der Kielen (1995) pointed out in her study, the reported acceptance of
relationships with members of the target community is not always necessarily an
indicator of actual acceptance of that community when interaction opportunities arise.
Interest in World Languages
My grandparents…I think that they just don’t understand very much about other
languages. They’re a little scared by other languages. And I think I’m never
going to be scared by a foreign language, because I already know one…Even if
you have no idea what they’re saying, if you know a foreign language you can
start with the tones and the body language, and you get a general idea of…what
they’re trying to say. (continuing male from French, urban School B)
In his conceptualization of the L2 Motivational Self System, Dörnyei (2009) has
argued that learning a language is more than just a mastery of its linguistic features. We
242 can observe this particularly well in an investigation of the topic of the last subscale
associated with integrativeness, “Interest in world languages.” This subscale goes
beyond the target language, to see how students may transfer their attitudes and
motivations to the study of different languages. As we can see in this quote, some
students made this shift with a fair amount of ease, displaying not just a knowledge of the
language and culture that they were learning, but also a real understanding of how to
approach and appreciate other languages.
However, if we consider the topical framework of the development of cross-
cultural understanding in immersion students, the concept of their interest in world
languages can be somewhat problematic, for two main reasons. First of all, having an
interest in world languages does not necessarily indicate cross-cultural understanding; a
student could potentially be very interested in mastering many languages with no interest
in understanding the cultures associated at all. Additionally, the curricular decisions
intended to develop cross-cultural understanding in the immersion students of a particular
immersion program would most likely not take the form of an encouragement of interest
in world languages. Therefore, this particular sector of integrativeness presents some
conceptual challenges to the consideration of the development of cross-cultural
understanding in immersion students.
However, one way that the topic of students’ interest in world languages might
provide some insight is suggested by the quantitative results summarized above. The
subscale “Interest in world languages” produced some very interesting results in the
quantitative data from the AMTB. Factors about students’ sustained exposure to cultures
243 in other countries, either through parent influence or through family ties abroad, seemed
to have a great effect on how those respondents reacted to statements about their interest
in world languages. Moreover, I observed a strong echo of this during the student
interviews, where, unlike their often mild responses to questions about the target
community, they differed greatly in their reaction to a question about whether they
wanted to learn another language, often based on their exposure to other languages
outside of school. As such, an investigation of this motivational factor can help to show
how family might play a role in developing cross-cultural understanding in immersion
students.
First of all, one group of the interviewees, most of whom had been relatively
positive about their immersion experiences and about language learning in general,
revealed absolutely no interest in learning more languages. When I asked them, “Have
you thought about studying another language?” a sample of responses were: “I’m not
interested” (non-continuing female from Spanish, suburban School D); “I don’t really
want to pick up another language because I like Spanish so much” (continuing female
from Spanish, suburban School D); “No, I’m happy with Spanish” (non-continuing
female from Spanish, suburban School E); “Um, I don’t know, not really” (non-
continuing male from French, suburban School C); “French is probably the first language
that comes to mind that I’d want to learn” (continuing female from French, suburban
School C); and “I dunno, there’s a lot of [languages] out there” (non-continuing male
from Spanish, suburban School D). Other students had given studying other languages
some thought, but had decided that they were “too complicated for me” (continuing
244 female from French, urban School B) or “kind of boring” (continuing female from
Spanish, urban School A).
As I suggested in the introduction, learning in an immersion context did not
necessarily result in all students being interested in other languages and cultures, either.
These students’ distinct lack of reflection and interest about learning other languages
certainly calls into question the frequent suggestion that the self-selecting process of
immersion program enrollment ensures a population of immersion students who are
inherently more motivated and interested in other cultures than non-immersion students
(Lapkin et al., 1990; Van der Kielen, 1995).
A few students seemed to be able to talk about wanting to learn other languages,
but they emphasized reasons that focused on cultural products like food or architecture.
As shown in the first section of this chapter, a focus on products was not an uncommon
way of understanding and referring to the concept of culture in the respondent group.
One non-continuing male from School B (French, urban) said that he wanted to learn
Italian because, “Italy is a cool country, it’d be nice to go to Italy and know how to say
stuff, and there’s all these cool Italian words that come from Italy: pizza, spaghetti.”
Similarly, a continuing male from School E (Spanish, suburban) professed a desire to
learn French “because if I were to go to Paris or something and cook for someone or open
up a restaurant there,” or Italian “because all their architecture and …like everything they
have is amazing and beautiful.” This particular student wanted to go to Rome “just for
tourism just to visit and look around.” Other students seemed to want to study other
languages for unclear reasons, perhaps as a way of just providing an answer to my
245 question: a continuing female from School C (French, suburban) said that she wanted to
learn Chinese “because like in movies, they’re like ‘dadadadada’ and they always speak
like that, I dunno.” Another female from School C, this one who had chosen not to
continue, spoke inaccurately about the relations between languages and cultures, claiming
for instance that she wanted to learn Chinese because of “sushi” and Spanish and Italian
because they are “the same” as French, the language that she already knew. So, although
this group of students did indeed show interest in learning world languages, I would
argue that the depth of their resolve and their true interest in those other languages and
cultures was based on superficial, sometimes faulty reasoning that did not show a lot of
reflection. These data reflect what I found about the students’ varied definitions of
culture in the first section of this chapter. As in that section, one should be reminded here
that these are early adolescents who may be at a stage of development and experience in
the world that hinders any serious reflection on this topic.
Finally, there were students who seemed to express sincere reasons for wanting to
learn another language, in a way that indicated to me that they had wanted to do so for a
long time and thought about it a great deal. In this category, we can certainly start with
the subjects of several of the case studies, including Kaley, whose only regret about
continuing in the immersion program was that she wanted to take other languages than
Spanish, something which was not possible in the immersion continuation program
associated with School D. Recall also from our previous chapter Carlos, who wanted to
compare languages, because he likes studying languages a lot; AnneMarie, also from the
previous chapter, wanted to “have some career like being able to speak a ton of
246 languages.” Importantly, the fourth case study subject, Thomas, did not have any
reflections of this type.
Other interviewees also showed profound and detailed interest in other world
languages. Like Kaley, one continuing male classmate from School D (Spanish,
suburban) was disappointed by the fact that he could not learn a second language in the
immersion continuation program, stating, “I really wanted to learn French [because] I
kind of wanted to live in southern France…like along the Mediterranean.” He continued
to say that he was also learning Hebrew, and that he would also be interested in Arabic,
because it sounded “really beautiful.” A non-continuing female student from School D
(Spanish, suburban) who already knew English, Spanish, Mandarin and Cantonese,
explained her choice to continue in learning French and Japanese: “I just like the little
concept of knowing another language and another culture, so I’m studying French at my
school right now. I just really enjoy learning other languages, I suppose.” These two
students had clearly already had ample opportunities to learn other languages through
their exposure at home and during travel; this mimics the observable groupings in the
quantitative data reflecting the “Interest in world languages” subscale.
Sometimes, students were interested in learning other world languages because of
reasons related to their own heritage. A non-continuing male from School A (Spanish,
urban) wanted to learn German because his father spoke it with his dog, but also “because
my ancestors were German, and I just think it’d kinda be cool to know more than just
commands for my dog.” A non-continuing female from School B (French, urban) said:
247
I want to learn how to speak Spanish and German and Finnish, and maybe
Latin…Spanish because that’s another common spoken language…I want to
speak German because I’m part German and Finnish because my grandpa’s
Finnish and I’m also part Finnish. And Latin because that’s like a base for most
languages, so I think …it makes it easier to learn other languages.
Her long list of languages included a variety of reasons for study, and clearly indicated a
deep and abiding interest in other world languages.
As with students’ attitudes toward the target community, there was a clear
diversity of the responses about students’ interest in learning world languages.
Furthermore, the way that students responded to interview questions about world
languages revealed that indeed language was not merely a content area for some of them.
Their ideal L2 selves spoke other languages, sometimes the language of the immersion
school, sometimes not. As such, Dörnyei’s statement that possible selves go beyond
“logical, intellectual arguments” when justifying their validity, to “images and senses” is
certainly supported (2009, p. 15). To reflect back to the socio-educational model, I
would argue that the students’ positive and negative responses to my question on this
topic seemed, in their detail and their vividness, to be more indicative of their
integrativeness, that is, whether or not they were “[open] to taking on characteristics of
another cultural or linguistic group,” than the other two contributing variables (Gardner,
2005, p. 7). As such, I am not surprised that the quantitative data for this particular
subscale was revealing as to the effect of different home background characteristics on
student responses. These were questions that were easy to understand and to respond to
248 in both the surveys and the interviews, and thus they were the most revealing via both
methods.
Importantly, all characteristics that indicated a development of cross-cultural
understanding in the immersion graduates in these data, like having exposure to other
languages and cultures through the home or through travel to countries beyond the target
country, were unrelated to anything taking place in the immersion program. This is
perhaps not surprising, as the promotion of interest in other world languages and cultures
in immersion curriculum is not a major goal of the program model. Indeed, as we saw
above and in Chapter Two, in Schools C and E, the pursuit of interest in other world
languages was actually hindered by continuing in the immersion program, since the
students who wanted to continue were not allowed to take a third language in the
middle/junior high school. However, given the passion with which the students spoke of
their interest in other languages, and the fact that it has been linked conceptually to
motivation in prior research and in the results of this study, it is perhaps something to be
considered in the pursuit of greater cross-cultural understanding in immersion students.
Conclusion
Integrativeness, defined as “being open to taking on the characteristics of another
cultural or linguistic group” (Gardner, 2005, p. 7), although seen by Gardner and his
colleagues to be one of the central concepts in the socio-educational model, did not
always seem to be an important factor in the L2 learning motivations of the immersion
graduates of this chapter. The quantitative data were unremarkable, beyond the fact that
the responses about some aspects of integrativeness, notably the subscale “Interest in
249 world languages,” were slightly more positive for students who had some types of
exposure to other languages and cultures in their home environments. The qualitative
data, however, revealed that the students’ responses to the surveys possibly were affected
by the fact that they understood the concept of culture in underdeveloped or problematic
ways; additionally, the students may have been reticent about answering questions about
members of the target community, as they were in the interviews. Some students gave
reasons showing that they were motivated by traditionally integrative reasons for learning
a language, particularly as a function of having traveled abroad. Their comments
reflecting the two other main aspects of integrativeness varied greatly. The nature and
intensity of the student comments about the target community were difficult to link to L2
learning motivation, given that they involved more reflections on culture. However, the
data did seem to support the notion that students with more interest in world languages
were more motivated in their L2 language learning.
In contrast, the concept of integrativeness was revealing about the topical
framework of the development of cross-cultural understanding in immersion students.
Students who had been able to create meaningful relationships with members of the
target culture offered more reflection about the target community and culture(s) that went
beyond superficial observations. Some students were able to tell vivid and interesting
stories about their interactions with other cultures and languages in response to my
questions about their interest in other world languages. These interactions indicated to
me that the successful development of cross-cultural understanding in these immersion
students was not necessarily a function of school activities. However, cross-cultural
250 understanding was certainly attainable, particularly with “extracurricular” exposure to the
target language and culture, like housing foreign exchange students or aides who speak
the target language. Given the challenges of incorporating comprehensive culture
objectives in the already complex content and language integrated objectives of the
immersion curriculum, this might be an excellent way for immersion programs to foster
more cross-cultural understanding in their students.
Instrumentality
A student who is instrumentally motivated to learn a language wants to learn a
language for a “purely practical reason,” often identified as getting a job, or fulfilling
language requirements (Gardner, 2005). As we saw in Chapter Two, instrumentality has
had a somewhat disputed status in the socio-educational model, particularly in
comparison with integrativeness, which has been seen by Gardner and his colleagues to
be more significant in its connection with language learning motivation. Additionally,
for the purposes of this study, we can ask: are students who are more pragmatic about
reasons for learning language less concerned about developing cross-cultural
understanding? When instrumentality is considered in the topical framework of
developing cross-cultural understanding in immersion students, it can be seen to have the
potential to be a complicating factor. A student who is motivated primarily by a
pragmatic need to know a language arguably would focus more on language acquisition,
rather than attaining a level of cross-cultural understanding of the community associated
with the language being studied.
251
In this section, I will investigate the quantitative and qualitative results from my
study related to the students’ instrumentality in order to both investigate its status as a
contributing factor to L2 learning motivation, and to examine how its presence might be a
complicating factor for the development of cross-cultural competence in immersion
students. I will also consider how Norton’s concept of investment provides a valuable
interpretive structure, particularly in her suggestion that L2 students seek both symbolic
and material resources in order to increase the value of their “cultural capital” in learning
an L2 (Norton, 2000a, p. 10). In questioning the relationship between “investment” and
“instrumental motivation,” she has specified that instrumental motivation has more often
been considered in the socio-educational model to be “fixed, unitary, and ahistorical,”
(2000, p. 10). As such, in my analysis of the qualitative data in this section, I will use the
lens of “symbolic resources” and “material resources” in order to clarify what is meant by
instrumentality; this might offer additional insight into a more dynamic conceptualization
of the notion.
Survey Responses: Dependable Correlations on a Rougher Scale
The subscale on the modified AMTB that I used for this study only included three
questions indicating instrumental motivation (Table 5.3). From these questions, a few
important observations can be made about the mechanics of this subscale on the modified
AMTB. First of all, only three items cannot be extremely revealing; it creates a poorer
and rougher interval scale than the other subscales, some of which had up to eight items.
Secondly, the statements were certainly limited in that they did not mention possible
instrumental factors that could be more relevant to early adolescent immersion students,
252 Table 5.3
Questions on the Modified AMTB Corresponding with the “Instrumental Orientation”
Subscale
Studying the [target] language can be important for me because other people will respect
me more if I know a world language.
Studying the [target] language can be important for me because it will make me a smarter
person.
Studying [target language] can be important to me because I think it will someday be
useful in getting a good job.
Note. Questions adapted from Gardner (1985a).
like college acceptance. Regardless, the performance of this subscale in the statistical
calculations did not surprise. “Instrumental orientation” correlated significantly with all
of the other subscales, with the exception of the anomalous “Target language use
anxiety” subscale. The Cronbach’s alpha of the subscale was .511, which is very
acceptable given the fact that the subscale only included three items.
Some results from the t-tests and ANOVA calculations about the “Instrumental
orientation” subscale indicated that some home background and school characteristics
were significant in how students responded to this subscale. Before addressing this, it is
worth mentioning that, despite the high percentage of Hispanic families in some of the
Spanish immersion schools in this study (notably School A), a nearly identical 14.8% of
the French immersion graduates and 14.9% of Spanish immersion graduates reported the
use of languages other than English in the home. With that in mind, whether or not
languages other than English were spoken in the home accounted for 3.5% of the
253 variance in student instrumental orientation; this featured a .5 standard deviation, where
students with other languages spoken in the home were more instrumentally motivated.
This means that there was slightly more likelihood that students exposed to other
languages in the home would agree with pragmatic reasons for learning a language.
Whether or not students had gone to Spanish or French immersion schools accounted for
4.1% of the difference in instrumental orientation; this featured a .5 standard deviation,
with Spanish immersion graduates more instrumentally motivated. Thus, graduates of
Spanish immersion schools were slightly more likely to be instrumentally motivated than
students who attended French immersion schools. I explore the implications of these
quantitative data in my investigation of the qualitative data in the next section.
Instrumentally Motivated Students, Traditionally Defined
In a longitudinal qualitative study about L2 learning motivation with Hungarian
children learning English, Nikolov (1999) found that foreign language students between
the ages of 6 and 14 did mention instrumental factors when asked why they wanted to
learn language, but that their reasons were “vague and general” (p. 46). I found in this
study that the 10-13-year-old students were actually quite specific about their
instrumental reasons for learning a language. Some of these reasons fit the traditional
definitions of instrumental motivation relating to access to material resources like a job.
When asked if it was helpful to know a second language, both French and Spanish
immersion graduates mentioned issues related to getting jobs, although by no means did
all interviewees reflect on this. Some elaborated on what they meant by a “job.” For
instance, a male continuing student from School E (Spanish, suburban) said: “[Spanish]
254 will help me if there’s a Spanish-speaking person and I was a doctor and he was only
speaking Spanish. If he only knew Spanish, I would be the only one who could help him,
and I could actually help him.” In this case, the student’s Spanish could be used in his
job as a tool for communicating with a patient. A non-continuing male student from
School B (French, urban) similarly said, “It’s good to know French because if you decide
to get a job like a lawyer, and if you have to go to France [because] your client lives
there, you’ll have to know your way to get around.” A non-continuing female student
from the same school agreed: “I don’t think unless I moved to a French-speaking
country…I would use it very much. Unless I had a job as a translator, or I moved to a
French-speaking country.” It is important to note here that these statements about
needing language for a job did contrast in one important way: the Spanish student saw the
language as possibly important to himself in his own environment, helping someone who
speaks Spanish; the French students saw themselves as having to travel to a French-
speaking country in order to use the language. This connects back to the quantitative data
that the Spanish students scored slightly more positively on the “Instrumental
orientation” subscale than did the French students; they were more likely to see ways to
use the language in their own environment due to the Spanish-speaking communities near
their own.
The idea that students wanted to be respected or feel smart as a result of their
language study, another pragmatic reason associated with the instrumental orientation,
was also seen in the interviews. This clearly emerged in Kaley’s desire to show off her
knowledge of Spanish in order to get others’ respect for being smart. As a non-
255 continuing male from School B (French, urban) said, “Not many kids know a second
language [like French]. I’m part of a minority, and I’m proud of that.” A different
continuing female from the same school agreed: “I just think it’s helpful with my
teachers, and they can say, ‘Wow, she speaks two languages.’ It’s just better to have
more stuff to do than just speaking English.” In some ways, I see this as an accurate
reflection of the “possible selves” concept developed by Dörnyei (2009) in conjunction
with the L2 Motivational Self System, particularly the “Ought-to Self.” The immersion
graduates, aware that they are known for being proficient in two languages, were happy
to fulfill their image as smart and enviable students, and it, in turn, could affect their
motivated behavior. Furthermore, as Norton would point out, they are accessing the
symbolic resource of respect and admiration through asserting their bilingualism. This
finding has also been supported by research in the TWI context (Potowski, 2004).
Other instrumental factors mentioned by students did not depart radically from
what one would expect from immersion students at this age. Although statements about
wanting to learn language for the pragmatic reason of getting college acceptance were not
a part of the modified AMTB, it is very reasonable to assume that Gardner and his
colleagues would accept this particular type of motivation to be an instrumental factor.
For these students, getting accepted into college might be more of a symbolic resource,
associated with more affective sentiments of accomplishment; others might see it as a
purely material resource, in that it gives access to future financial success (Norton,
2000a). As an example of college acceptance as a form of instrumental motivation, one
can recall that Thomas stated that “[knowing Spanish] would be good for college, [since]
256 you wouldn’t have to learn a different language.” Other students agreed, stating: “you
end up getting accepted to more colleges after you finish high school,” (non-continuing
male from School E – Spanish, suburban); and, “it will help you in college if you
continue” (continuing female from School C – French, suburban). A continuing male
from School E (Spanish, suburban) gave a more elaborate response, explaining that he
wanted to continue because:
I figured that it would go…really well on the college resume. Because I just want
to get into a good college, and…I’m always hearing about how you have to have a
good GPA to get into a good Ivy League, but nobody really knows how to get in
there, you just have to have like a bunch of extra credits and maybe a GPA of 3.7
or more.
This particular seventh grader was somewhat unique in the specificity of his response, but
it is clear that needing language for the practical reason of getting accepted into, or
succeeding in, college, was not far from many students’ minds. Despite their ages, many
had older brothers, older sisters, and parents, who had made it clear that language could
be used as a tool for getting what they wanted in the holy grail of college admissions.
Clearly, the idea of college admissions could be added to the AMTB to better reflect the
age and developmental stage of some of the respondents in this study, as another material
resource accessible due to language study.
The examples above stretch Gardner’s definitions of instrumental motivation in a
way that seems relatively natural, given the age group of the participants of this study.
Like Gardner’s definition of instrumentality, these examples reflect the students’ beliefs
257 about how the language will be useful to them in the future. They also reflect Norton’s
(2000a) idea of learners “investing” in a second language in order to acquire symbolic
and material resources in order to someday access more cultural capital.
The Unique Instrumental Motivations of Immersion Graduates
Early adolescents are known for living in the moment, and I found that many of
the immersion graduates that I interviewed, while perhaps unable to articulate their plans
for using the language in the future or uninterested in reflecting on how others might
respect them for their knowledge, were more than willing to share their stories of how
using the language had made them feel proud or unique in some way. I felt that many of
these circumstances reflected these students’ unique instrumentality as immersion
graduates. It is also important to emphasize that the stories below were prompted by very
general questions about what students liked about knowing another language, or what
they remembered about being in immersion school.
Many students proudly shared stories with me about using the language as a code.
This emerged in the case studies about both Kaley and Thomas. One very distinctive
such story was told by AnneMarie, the non-continuing female subject of a mini case
study in the previous chapter. She recounted the following:
In fourth grade, me and my best friend, we were writing letters for a long time to
[pen pals] in English, and then they came and visited us, and we decided we
didn’t really like them very much. So we decided to only speak French with them
for the rest of the way. And they got very mad at us. Yeah, it’s a secret language.
In this circumstance, and in others, the immersion graduate used the target language with
a similarly proficient interlocutor in order to keep peers from understanding what she was
258 saying. Other students cited similar incidents, including ones from competing on sports
teams (“I’ll have a whole team of a sport and we’ll all be from French immersion, and
we’ll come up with some play that’s in French, and the other teams won’t know” –
continuing female from French, suburban School C); interacting with students from other
schools (“We had a greeting with the Spanish immersion kids, and they were sort of
being mean to us, so then we decided to start talking in French” – continuing female from
French, urban School B); and parents (“we’ll be talking behind [my dad’s] back and he
won’t know what we’re saying” – continuing female from Spanish, suburban School E).
Even a non-continuing male from School E (Spanish, suburban), who said that, during his
elementary years, he did not grasp the utility of knowing Spanish, concluded, “But now
that I’ve actually gone to a Spanish-speaking country I’ve found it very useful and fun,
talking behind people’s backs.” In this, the student shifted quickly from a travel situation
encouraging reflection on integrative motives, to a very instrumental motive of talking
behind someone’s back. The immersion graduates shared these incidents with great pride,
and it was clear to me that they were passionate and very motivated to define who could
and could not communicate with them by strategic use of the target language.
Canagarajah’s (1997, 2004) concept of “safe houses” can help explain this
phenomenon. In these “safe houses,” he has argued, students may flagrantly oppose the
identities desired in the classroom, in a fluid and mobile space that they use as they wish.
“Safe houses” are a site where students can negotiate their own identities according to
their own rules. I would argue that these immersion students, in using their immersion
language as a vehicle for inclusion and exclusion both in and out of school contexts, have
259 created a variation on “safe houses” where they have taken control of defining and
creating their own space that does not conform to their teachers’ or parents’ expectations.
To use Norton’s (2000a) terminology, they are using their language as a symbolic
resource that allows them to govern their own social space more effectively.
Other related situations also emerged as important stories for the immersion
graduates about how they used their knowledge of the target language. Sometimes, as in
Thomas’ case, the students used the language in order to translate for target language-
speaking people struggling to function in an English-only environment. Like Kaley,
several Spanish students also spoke about talking with Spanish-speaking workers in the
service industries, like at local places that served Mexican food. One such story from a
continuing female from School C (French, suburban) was somewhat unusual for being in
the French language: “I was in the school play…and the makeup people were both
French. And the parents who had to do the makeup couldn’t understand them. So they
asked me to translate for them.” Sometimes, the immersion graduates used the language
to eavesdrop on people speaking the target language without their knowledge. One
continuing male from School A (Spanish, urban) told this story:
I take the city bus a lot with my sister, and there’s always people talking Spanish
on the bus, and they don’t think we can understand it. So while they’re talking in
Spanish, we’ll say stuff in Spanish, too, so that they know we understand and we
know what they’re saying, and then when we say it back, they’ll get all quiet
because they already know that we know what they’re saying.
260 In all of these situations, the students were describing their use of the language in a
purely functional, pragmatic way. Even though some of the situations perhaps would
have allowed them to connect with members of the target community, they chose to
describing the target language as a tool that could help them stand out as experts, impress
other people, and assert their own identities as successful language learners, in
circumstances that were usually not available to monolingual English students of their
same age. As such, I would expand the definition of instrumentality to encompass these
situations that are somewhat unique to immersion students in a largely monolingual
English sociocultural environment.
I heard echoes of these types of situations when some students told stories about
using the target language while traveling. When asked about their travel experiences,
some students elected to tell me about traveling situations that were not about cultural
connections whatsoever, nor were they about blending in to the culture or making bridges
with people from the target culture (as would befit someone with more integrativeness).
Notably, these were not necessarily traveling situations in countries where the target
language is spoken widely. As an example, one continuing female from School D
(Spanish, suburban) told this story:
We were at this restaurant when we were on vacation…and there was all these
Spanish people there, and my cousin, he had a retainer, and he accidentally threw
[it] away. But the Spanish-speaking people didn’t understand him…And so, me
and my brother, we had to talk to them in Spanish and tell them that he lost his
retainer and he needed to get it back.
261 Like in the situations presented in the U.S. context, this one only involves the use of the
language as a tool, with no attempt made to connect to the Spanish-speaking individuals
beyond attaining a pragmatic goal. Even though in this context it would be unusual for a
person to try to make a personal connection with members of the target culture, I found it
interesting that the student chose this story to tell me as an example of a meaningful time
when she used the target language. A continuing female from School C (French,
suburban) similarly used the target language as a tool to help someone in another country.
She told this story:
In the airport, coming back from Africa, there was a man who walked up and he
said, in French, “Do any of you speak French?” My dad understood that, and he
said, “These two.”… [The man] needed a phone charger but he didn’t speak
English….I told my dad, I said, “Dad, he needs a phone charger.” He could have
gotten a phone charger from my dad so that was kind of an interesting thing.
For these students, their knowledge of the target language served as a pragmatic tool to
help them to access the symbolic, affirming resource of helping someone else, as well as
the material resource of being able to navigate a difficult situation. Stories like this did
not contain any reference to the target community or culture(s) at all, again suggesting a
more instrumental motive for using the language.
Finally, sometimes students were instrumentally motivated to learn a language
because of the possibility that knowing the mechanics of a language could help them with
their future language studies. Many students mentioned the interrelatedness of
languages, including this non-continuing female from School C (French, suburban):
262
I think it’s good because in high school you have to learn Spanish, so I’ll have my
French background and Spanish. My mom is half-Hispanic…and she said French
is really similar to Spanish, because they had the same punctuation and letters.
Even though this student had chosen to leave the immersion program, she saw the utility
of knowing French because of how it would relate to other languages that she might
study. Spanish students also recognized this connection, like this continuing male from
School A (Spanish, urban), who said, “If you know Spanish then you should be able to
learn French, Italian, and Portuguese a lot easier than just learning from English,” and
one from School D (Spanish, suburban) who said, “It’d just be so easy [to learn French]
because they’re both from Latin, so it’d just be really easy for me to learn.” Although
this interpretation of an instrumental motivation departs both from the traditional
definitions of the socio-educational model and the more situational definitions of
language use that emerged from many of the interviews, it is important because, once
again, it was not connected to any type of cultural knowledge or awareness at all. The
students citing these as reasons to learn language were simply motivated by the utility of
knowing a Romance language as a way to facilitate future study, the material resource
that knowing the first language can provide.
Conclusion
Instrumental motivation has traditionally been downplayed and defined narrowly
in the socio-educational model. However, in this study, the qualitative findings in
particular suggested that the immersion graduates’ early adolescent identities and atypical
proficiency in the target language could be strongly connected to new interpretations for
263 instrumentality. Many students cited jobs, being respected, and college applications as
powerful incentives to develop their knowledge of the target language, following the
traditional definition of instrumentality from the socio-educational model (Gardner,
2005). Others had poignant and deeply felt stories to tell about how they used the
language as a tool to give evidence of or create a “safe house” where they could control
their social space and assert their identities as immersion students (Canagarajah, 2004,
1997). These new interpretations of ways that students can be motivated to learn an L2
merit consideration in future versions of the AMTB, as they seemed strongly connected
to the students’ L2 learning motivation. Furthermore, when compared to the integrative
reasons for learning a language given by the students, these instrumental reasons were
expressed more frequently and vividly.
Norton’s concept of “investment” can provide an alternate framework for
interpretation. As described above, there were clearly many possible ways that an
immersion graduate could be instrumentally motivated. I would argue that instrumental
motivation, for these immersion graduates, changed depending on both their own
educational context and the context in which they were attempting to use the language as
a tool for communication. Being instrumentally motivated was thus something that was
not a fixed aspect of their personalities, since it depended so much on context. As such,
Norton’s concept of “investment” seems to fit much more effectively than the concept of
instrumental motivation as developed in the socio-educational model. The students
seemed to be “investing” themselves in the language, working to acquire both symbolic
resources (respect, access to safe houses, knowledge) and material resources (job,
264 college, navigating a difficult travel situation) (Norton, 2000a). Their investment in the
language depended on where they were and whom they were with, as well as what
opportunities presented themselves to them.
Nonetheless, the general concept of instrumentality can offer a few insights into
the topical framework of developing cross-cultural understanding in immersion students.
It is most revealing when considered in tandem with the concept of integrativeness
reviewed in the previous section. As I have illustrated above, the students gave more and
varied instrumental reasons for learning a language more freely during the interviews
than they did integrative reasons. These instrumental reasons were by definition not
based in any concept of communicating or making a connection with members of the
target culture. Even in some situations, like the travel contexts outlined above, where
students might have been more motivated to become more familiar with the target
culture, several of the respondents simply mentioned how they had used the language as a
tool to solve a problem or achieve a goal.
I would argue that this focus on reasons for learning a language largely unrelated
to developing cross-cultural understanding is natural and reasonable for students who
have, in their immersion programs, used the language as a tool for gaining content
knowledge since their first classes. Immersion programs focus on the “instructional use”
of language, and the curriculum is by definition “content-driven” (Fortune & Tedick,
2008). As Van der Kielen (1995), in her study of elementary French immersion students
in Canada, concluded, immersion students’ acquisition of the language “does not, either
per se or via a change in attitudes and motivations, create a need for contact or encourage
265 interaction with persons of the target group” (1995, p. 302). Helping students to develop
the ability to use the language accurately and consistently as a type of tool for
accomplishing other (content) objectives is one of the constant missions of immersion
educators. The students in this study have effectively taken this tool outside of the
classroom to use in the circumstances presented to them. This analysis of instrumentality
in the immersion graduates in this study thus reveals that immersion programs have been
successful in helping students understand and become motivated by the utility of
knowing an L2. However, as Gardner argued (2001a), and as the data have illustrated,
instrumental and integrative motives for learning a language are not mutually exclusive.
It might behoove immersion educators to examine how they could instill integrative
motives for learning in their students as much as they have instrumental motives.
Conclusion
What exists at the crossroads of motivation and the development of cross-cultural
understanding in immersion students? Why do some immersion students seem to develop
considerable cross-cultural understanding, and some do not, and is it related to their L2
learning motivation? In this chapter, I used the socio-educational model’s concept of L2
learning motivation to investigate the topical framework of developing cross-cultural
understanding in immersion students. In the modified AMTB used in this study, the
respondents were invited to define culture however they would want. Many immersion
students in this study, upon a qualitative inquiry, revealed that they had varied
understandings of how to define and interpret experiences relating to other cultures,
however. An analysis of the quantitative and the qualitative data relating to the three
266 contributing variables to the students’ integrativeness suggested that most of the students
who had been able to develop positive attitudes toward the target community and strong
interest in world languages did so as a function of increased exposure to other cultures,
languages, and individuals outside of the immersion classroom. More commonly, in the
qualitative interviews, most of the immersion graduates in this study seemed to focus on
the symbolic and material resources that they would be able to access through their
bilingualism, an indicator of the dominance of instrumental motives for learning
language.
The implications for the development of cross-cultural understanding in
immersion students are numerous. Importantly, the students’ discussions of culture both
in the school and travel contexts indicated that not all immersion graduates have
developed understandings or interpretations of the concept of culture. This could be
attributable to a number of factors, notably including their developmental stage in early
adolescence, when the formation of personal identity sometimes results in a rejection of
other worldviews (Stevenson, 1998). It does ultimately indicate that not all of the
students had developed cross-cultural understanding in the course of their immersion
education, however. The fact that there was considerable variation in the students’
responses to questions in the qualitative interviews about their attitudes toward the target
community and their interest in world languages supports this contention. The data do
suggest that some parts of immersion programs as they are now can be enhanced in order
to meet the goal of developing cross-cultural understanding: encouraging relationships
with members of the target culture through exchange programs, housing aides with
267 student families, and cross-cultural friendships in the more diverse schools; building on
students’ instrumental motives for learning language with the encouragement of more
integrative motives; and more. I explore more such suggestions for practitioners in
Chapter Six.
268
CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION
In this study, I have proposed to investigate the L2 learning motivation of
elementary immersion school graduates. The research questions that have guided the
study have been:
RQ1: What contributes to the second language (L2) learning motivation of
elementary immersion program graduates? How do these motivating factors
interrelate?
RQ2: What does an examination of the L2 learning motivation of early adolescent
immersion graduates reveal about important issues in immersion education, such
as: (a) Issues about persistence in and attrition from immersion programs? (b)
Issues about the development of cross-cultural understanding in immersion
students?
RQ3: How do the data collected through student interviews compare to the data
generated by the results of the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery?
These questions set me on the path of my analysis, which has taken me through several
iterations through different theoretical and contextual frameworks. In this chapter, I will
address the original questions posed by this study.
Research Question One: Describing L2 Learning Motivation
What contributes to the second language (L2) learning motivation of elementary
immersion program graduates? How do these motivating factors interrelate?
269 Before beginning this study, I found that the body of research in immersion
education has struggled with addressing this topic in a satisfactory way. Many of these
studies have faced research design issues, such as those that have attempted to identify a
causal link between immersion education and L2 learning motivation (or between L2
learning motivation and academic achievement in immersion programs) but had not been
able to randomly assign students to immersion programs and monolingual English
programs (Carey, 1987; Lapkin et al., 1990;Van der Kielen, 1995). Other studies
addressed issues like student persistence in immersion programs without actually
consulting the students, depending instead on parent, teacher, or administrator opinions
(Christian et al., 1994; Duff, 1991; Lapkin et al., 1983; Rhodes, 1989; Rhodes et al.,
1987), even though, as Oxford and Shearin (1994) have stated, “teachers are often
unaware of their students’ specific motivations” (p. 16). Although all of these works of
research have had something to add to the body of knowledge on L2 learning motivation
in immersion education, the overall picture that they produced about the social
psychology of the language learner was murky due to the various challenges faced by
their authors.
I chose in this study to start with the socio-educational model as a means of
identifying some possible factors which might contribute to the L2 learning motivation of
the immersion graduates. I found that some of the factors included in this model seemed
vital to the immersion graduates’ desire to devote energy to their L2 learning, indicating
that these were indeed important components of their L2 learning motivation. Notably,
the model’s two conceptual mainstays, integrativeness and instrumentality, were shown
270 in both the quantitative and qualitative data to be factors in the motivation of many
(though not all) of the immersion graduates to learn language. However, the interview
data suggested that the two factors were weighted slightly differently in the eyes of the
immersion graduates than has been put forth in early research based on the socio-
educational model, with students more likely to depend on instrumental motives (such as
the symbolic and material resources of getting into college, earning others’ respect, and
being able to use the language as a code) than integrative motives (such as making cross-
cultural connections, appreciating the target community, and showing an interest in world
languages) in articulating their reasons why they were motivated in their language study.
The qualitative data further revealed that the students often did not differentiate between
instrumental and integrative motivational factors, clearly indicating that integrativeness
and instrumentality were closely related for the participants in this context.
This study also revealed that the students’ underlying patterns of belief about
important, foundational concepts to immersion education, like language and culture
learning, were reflected in their L2 learning motivation as defined by the socio-
educational model. For instance, although the quantitative data showed that the students’
attitudes about learning the language correlated predictably with other components of the
socio-educational model, interviews revealed that immersion students did not have a firm
grasp on the nature of language learning in immersion education, often defining it as
something related to traditional L2 pedagogical practices of memorization and verb
conjugation, as something centered around the interplay between English and the target
language in the classroom, or, alternately, as a mysterious process that they could not
271 understand. The students’ expressions of frustration or interest in learning a language,
indications of L2 learning motivation, were connected directly to those expressed beliefs,
rather than to the concept of content-based language learning that is the true foundation
of immersion education. Similarly, the immersion graduates’ interviews also revealed
that some of the students were more likely to address the target culture in simple terms,
without showing much deeper interest in the perspectives or the more detailed
characteristics of the target community. These findings reflect the findings in studies by
Mantle-Bromley (1995) and Dagenais (2008), which have shown that early adolescents
are not necessarily insightful about other languages and cultures, despite the fact that they
may have had considerable exposure to those languages and cultures. Even though there
is no “Attitudes about learning the culture” subscale in the AMTB, the inclusion of
culture in aspects of integrativeness like “Attitudes toward the target community” depend
a great deal on the respondents’ understanding of culture. Thus, I would suggest that, in
order to understand L2 learning motivation in these immersion graduates, we must not
only understand how they feel about language and culture learning, but also, what they
believe that language and culture learning entail.
Two factors identified in the socio-educational model seemed to contribute much
less (and much more unpredictably) to the L2 learning motivation of the particular
participant group of early adolescent immersion graduates: target language use anxiety
and parental encouragement. In the case of target language use anxiety, this can be
attributed to the nature of immersion learning. It is important to note here that, in the
model itself, anxiety is not normally considered to correlate with L2 learning motivation,
272 although it is seen to hinder achievement (Gardner, 2005). In this study, the quantitative
data indeed did suggest that this language learning anxiety did not correlate with the other
L2 learning motivation factors. The qualitative data suggested that immersion graduates
experienced language learning anxiety as they participated in the immersion program or
attempted to communicate in the language outside of the program, but this anxiety did
not seem to enter into their motivation to learn the L2. Most of the interview respondents
seemed to know that learning an L2 was a situation that would take work and not luck,
and, to many of them, their target language use anxiety essentially signaled that the
process of language learning was working. This mirrors the work of MacIntyre and his
colleagues (2003b), which posited that language learning anxiety is not a factor in
immersion students’ motivation or willingness to communicate. The identification of
language learning anxiety as a factor in L2 learning motivation is not indicated by the
results of this study either.
Parental encouragement was ambiguous as a factor in L2 learning motivation not
because of the context of immersion education, but because of the nature of early
adolescents. Reflecting the shift investigated by Bandura (1997) and others, the students
in this study sometimes agreed and sometimes disagreed with their parents about
immersion education and their own attitudes about language learning. The quantitative
data suggested that the immersion graduates were not completely clear about their
parents’ thoughts about immersion education, and the parents, in turn, did not always
understand their child’s proficiency level in immersion education. When it came to
parental influence on whether or not the students chose to continue in immersion
273 education, it was clear that the influence was multidirectional, with the students
sometimes agreeing with their parents wholeheartedly, and sometimes completely
disagreeing with them. As such, with the factor of parental influence on L2 learning
motivation in this context, it is difficult to say how exactly this worked for these early
adolescents. Their developmental stage dictates that many of these students were
probably in transition from a focus on their parents to a more considerable focus on peer
influence, and the data bore that out.
The socio-educational model has featured several other factors contributing to L2
learning motivation that could not be completely addressed in this study due to the
uniqueness of the context of immersion education in the United States. For instance,
evaluating the students’ attitudes about the language course was problematic due to the
nature of immersion education. Asking the students about their “language course” was
not possible, since they had experienced a number of different courses that taught
language in a manner integrated with content instruction. As seen in their reflections on
language learning, the ambiguity of their understanding of this complex relationship
between content and language learning essentially precluded any way of clearly
addressing how they felt about a specific language course. This indicated that the
construct of L2 learning motivation in the socio-educational model was in fact based on
assumptions about the L2 learning context, namely in this case that the students would be
readily able to identify a language course. Relatedly, I did not include questions about
“language teachers” in the modified AMTB or in the interviews, since the way that the
274 socio-educational model identified the language teacher was based on the assumption that
the students had only one easily identifiable language teacher.
This study did support the general idea that immersion teachers were a factor in
students’ language learning motivation, however, indicating that some assumptions made
in the socio-educational model were somewhat more definitional (the language teacher as
one fixed individual to be evaluated by the student) than conceptual (the figure of the
language teacher as an important motivational factor). Even though the factor of
“Evaluation of the language teacher” put forth in the socio-educational model could not
be included in my modified AMTB, the students repeatedly brought up their elementary
immersion teachers in response to my open-ended questions in the interviews. They
spoke passionately and at length about their positive and negative experiences with their
teachers, but they also focused on the teachers’ personal qualities rather than their own
experiences learning the immersion language. As such, they were not evaluating their
teachers, as the socio-educational model has defined that factor. I would argue, again,
that we must consider a broader consideration of the students’ learning context in our
consideration of their L2 learning motivation; immersion teachers should be considered
not just as fixtures in the learning situation who carry out the immersion curriculum, but
as individuals with personalities who create (or do not create) meaningful relationships
with students which, in turn, can motivate (or not motivate) them to study the L2.
Similarly, a third group of L2 learning motivational factors emerged primarily
from the qualitative data and the use of secondary theoretical frameworks to aid in my
analysis. In order to see these other factors as important to L2 learning motivation, we
275 must continue to consider the immersion graduates more holistically, as players in social
systems and structures as well as individuals with agency and beliefs (Norton, 2000a).
As argued in the discussion of teachers’ influence above, for these young students, the
experience of learning the L2 (and its associated motivation) was indistinguishable from
other features of their learning context, like teachers. For instance, peer relationships,
although rarely the topic of investigation in immersion education or L2 learning
motivation research, emerged as very important factors for these early adolescents.
Studying in a classroom with the same individuals for many years gave many of the
respondents a sense of belonging and ease (or, in some cases, a sense of alienation) that
they did not necessarily distinguish from their motivation about learning the L2. Not
surprisingly, the nature of the continuation program in the middle/junior high school was
of considerable concern to many of the interview respondents, in that it signaled a change
in the learning experience. The interview data suggested that students who saw this
change unfavorably were often more likely to be in the non-continuing group. Therefore,
another important factor in these students’ L2 learning motivation was indeed their
attitudes toward the learning situation, but going beyond just the language course and the
language teacher, and including their peer group and the school environment.
Research Question Two: Addressing Issues in Immersion Education
What does an examination of the L2 learning motivation of early adolescent
immersion graduates reveal about important issues in immersion education?
The differences in L2 learning motivation observable in the students surveyed and
interviewed in this study have offered important insights into the immersion programs as
276 well as to the social psychology of the students themselves. These differences also mirror
the topical frameworks that I have identified as vital to immersion education today:
persistence and attrition in immersion programs, and developing cross-cultural
understanding in immersion students. I will summarize some of the findings about these
different groups and their L2 learning motivations in this section.
(a) Issues about persistence in and attrition from immersion programs?
One of the major organizing principles for the analysis in this study has been an
investigation into the topical framework of persistence in and attrition from immersion
programs. As such, the differences between the continuing and the non-continuing
immersion graduates were discussed at length in Chapter Four. To reiterate that chapter’s
conclusions here, the relationship between the students’ language learning motivation and
their persistence in the immersion program was not completely straightforward. Indeed,
sometimes it was rather counterintuitive; for instance, students who chose to leave the
program were slightly more statistically likely to have positive attitudes about language
learning than those students who chose to continue (2.4% effect size, .5 standard
deviation); that was the one and only subscale on the AMTB in which there was a
statistically significant difference between the two groups of students. This means that
students who continued and those who did not continue were statistically
indistinguishable in all other areas, suggesting that, at least in how L2 learning
motivation has been operationalized in the socio-educational model, the two groups do
not differ at all.
277
Because this study featured a mixed methods design, I was able to interrogate this
conclusion in more detail. If there is no statistical difference between the students who
continue and who do not continue, why did some students decide to continue and others
decide to leave immersion programs? The students who chose to stay in the immersion
program, in the interviews, expressed contentment and fulfillment with their peer
relationships as well as the school environment of the immersion continuation program
during our conversation. Those students who had chosen to leave the immersion program
were more often critical of the middle/junior high school housing the immersion
continuation program, or at least were more positive about a different middle/junior high
school option. The non-continuing students seemed more likely to find social reasons to
leave the immersion program (negative peer interactions in the immersion environment, a
desire to stay with peers who were going to an alternative program, etc.), although that
was certainly not always the case.
For the purposes of this study and the question above, we must also ask, “Does
this dynamic have anything to do with L2 learning motivation?” If we limit the
definition of L2 learning motivation to the socio-educational model, it is unlikely.
However, with an expansion of the definition of L2 learning motivation beyond the
factors defined in the socio-educational model, to a more holistic view of the language
learner such as those suggested by Norton’s notion of investment (2000a) or Dörnyei’s
L2 Motivational Self System (2009), we can certainly conclude that these factors are still
important aspects of students’ L2 learning motivation.
278
(b) Issues about the development of cross-cultural understanding in immersion
students?
In Chapter Five, I investigated the numerous insights that the data in this study
offered about the development of cross-cultural understanding in immersion students.
Importantly, the students’ discussions of culture both in the school and travel contexts
indicated that not all immersion graduates have developed understandings or
interpretations of the concept of culture. This could be attributable to a number of
factors, notably including their developmental stage in early adolescence, when the
formation of personal identity sometimes results in a rejection of other worldviews
(Stevenson, 1998). It does ultimately indicate that not all of the students had developed
cross-cultural understanding in the course of their immersion education, however. The
fact that there was considerable variation in the students’ responses to questions in the
qualitative interviews about their attitudes toward the target community and their interest
in world languages supports this contention.
I was able to observe some distinct differences in the students that I interviewed,
based on two major types of exposure to the target language and culture outside of the
classroom: experience traveling abroad to a country where the language was spoken, and
relationships formed with members of the target culture(s). If students had been able to
travel abroad and have a home stay or some type of sustained experience beyond tourism,
they often reflected on their own L2 learning with more insight, passion, and enthusiasm.
They were more able to articulate why learning a language was important to them, and
they seemed more ready to consider the role that the language would play in their lives
279 for a long time. If students could mention and talk at length about members of the target
culture who had been meaningful and important to them, they seemed equally motivated
about learning their L2. Although these two areas specifically were not investigated by
the AMTB or the parent survey, I feel that they are a further indication that L2 learning
motivation was indeed related to the development of cross-cultural understanding in
immersion students.
Research Question Three: Mixing Methods
How do the data collected through student interviews compare to the data
generated by the results of the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery?
In Chapter Two, the socio-educational model and its related instrument of
measurement, the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB), were shown to have been
extremely influential in the field of L2 learning motivation research. One critique of the
dominance of this model is the fact that it is deeply rooted in quantitative research, which
has led to the suggestion that it has tacitly adopted an argument that there is a measure of
causality between positive attitudes, strong integrative orientations, and achievement in
the language (Crookes & Schmidt, 1991). In order to examine this dynamic further, I
introduced qualitative methods into my study. This adheres to the dialectic thesis of
mixed methods research, where opposing viewpoints of different methods and their
interaction can create tension and be revealing in their own ways, possibly verifying
and/or generating theory in the same study (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003). This research
question thus addresses both the methodological and theoretical questions posed by this
study.
280
The analysis presented in Chapters Four and Five has highlighted many of the
context-limited assumptions about L2 learners that are central to the socio-educational
model, and its associated instrument of measurement, the AMTB. As the review of the
research supporting the socio-educational model suggested, the socio-educational model
has been based on key assumptions about the L2 students and their learning setting that
can make some of its components impossible to examine and test in some cases. For
example, because the model originated and was supported by research set in bilingual
community contexts in the Canadian setting, it featured a strong emphasis on positive
attitudes toward the target community, a motivational factor that has not been shown to
be as important in other contexts (Singh, 1987). Immersion education in the United
States, where content classes are taught in the L2 and the L2 target community may not
be readily accessible, is one such context. Although Gardner (1985b) has argued that the
AMTB must always be altered to reflect the context of a given research study, I feel that
the struggles that I faced in this study, as well as its results, offer evidence that these
assumptions are more profoundly rooted in the model. Often, if they cannot be met, they
alter the meaning of important components of the model so much as to render it
significantly altered.
Some examples of these problematic assumptions include the nature of the
students’ access to a community of target language speakers, the language course, the
language teacher, the students’ language anxiety, and the interests of the students.
Components of the socio-educational model like integrativeness, and their corresponding
questions on the AMTB, have been founded in the fact that the L2 learners will be able to
281 identify and understand the culture of the target community and its members. As this
study has shown, this is not consistently the case with early adolescent immersion
graduates in the part of the United States where the study is set, for a variety of reasons.
Second, immersion students cannot be successfully surveyed about their attitudes toward
the language course or the language teacher, since their L2 education occurs across many
years, with many different courses taught in the L2 and language teachers who focus on
teaching content while using the L2. Questions on this topic thus could not be included
in the version of the AMTB administered in this study. One final example, as we have
seen, involves the way that instrumental motivation is defined in the socio-educational
model. The assumption is that, for the participants in a study based on this model, there
exists an awareness of the same practical benefits to learning a language, namely, getting
a job or getting into college, as those are the types of questions included on the AMTB.
However, as this study has shown, early adolescents often do not have this awareness.
I was able to approach the themes that arose in the interviews in a way that was
grounded in the socio-educational model but not limited to it. Sometimes, accessing
additional theoretical frameworks of L2 learning motivation allowed me to suggest an
alternate explanation for something that was not explained by the socio-educational
model. As illustrated, the results from the AMTB about students’ attitudes about
language learning revealed that students who left the immersion programs were slightly
more positive about learning a language than those that continued; supporting this
finding, schools with high attrition rates actually featured students with more positive
attitudes than schools where there was little attrition. In the interviews, it became clear
282 that students often did not have a great deal of insight into the nature of language learning
in an immersion context, often defining “language learning” more traditionally and
failing to identify content learning as the main opportunity to learn language in an
immersion context. This exploration of the patterns of thinking and belief with the
students has mimicked Ushioda’s (2009) grounding of L2 learning motivation research in
attribution theory, where not only the surface statements of attitude are considered, but
also students’ definitions of language learning in general. Additionally, I found that
Norton’s (2000a) identification of the “multiple desires” of the language learner in her
notion of investment was particularly helpful as a theoretical framework in this instance.
In a sense, it, as well as attribution theory, opened the conceptual door to the idea that,
even when attitudes about language learning are negative, other factors will certainly play
a role in the students’ L2 learning motivation.
In other cases, using a secondary theoretical framework has allowed me to
interpret unexpected themes that had emerged from the interview data and that did not
seem to be accounted for in the results from the AMTB. One example of this can be seen
in my analysis of the theme of instrumental motivation, which, as I stated above, was
somewhat problematic in its treatment in the AMTB. It was clear from the AMTB data
based on the socio-educational model’s theoretical framework that the participants had a
measure of instrumental motivation, but otherwise, the data were unremarkable.
However, in talking to the participants and considering the ideas put forth in Norton’s
notion of investment, it was clear that students were as interested in accessing the
symbolic resources of L2 language mastery (respect, access to safe spaces, knowledge) as
283 they were in accessing the material resources (job, college). Going beyond the socio-
educational model and into some of the concepts developed in the secondary framework
of investment (Norton, 2000a), in this case, gave me an insight into the students and a
way of interpreting it that was not afforded by solely adhering to the socio-educational
model and the results from the AMTB.
Implications and Suggestions for Immersion Administrators and Educators
In this section, I would like to offer some implications and make some
suggestions for individuals who work with these immersion programs on a daily basis.
All of the suggestions that I will make are grounded in my findings, with a consideration
of best practice in immersion education as well. However, I do not claim to know more
about immersion administration or instruction than those who do it as a profession.
Although I hope that these suggestions will be helpful to them in a consideration of their
students’ L2 learning motivation and the topical frameworks addressed in this study, I
realize that other factors come into play when creating and sustaining an immersion
program. This section is merely meant to share more information and ideas, not to
dictate what absolutely must be done.
1. District-Level Administrators
Looking at one-way early total immersion programs from the district perspective,
the transition between the elementary immersion program and the middle/junior high
school continuation program emerges as the primary issue. District-level administrators
have a vested interest in creating sustainable and successful immersion programs, since
successful programs mean continued state funding for districts and students who benefit
284 from long-term L2 study. This study has shown that there are several ways that district-
level administrators could make decisions that might improve this transition in their
districts.
First of all, the administrators should look closely at the school environment of
the immersion continuation program. My data showed that students who left the
immersion program during the transition between elementary and middle/junior high
schools did not necessarily have worse attitudes about learning language, nor did they
necessarily have complaints about their teachers or their experiences in immersion
education, or parents who had convinced them to leave the program. What many of the
non-continuing students did have, however, was a dislike of the middle/junior high
school housing the immersion continuation program. Programs with more differences
between the elementary school environment and the middle/junior high school
environment had more attrition. Non-continuing students from those schools commonly
complained about how big the middle/junior high school was in comparison to their
elementary school. They also made comments that reflected on the racial and
socioeconomic demographic differences between their elementary and middle/junior high
schools. One way for district administrators to respond to these findings would certainly
be to introduce initiatives that would make the elementary immersion schools look more
demographically representative of the district as a whole. If possible, they could also
establish continuation programs in smaller middle/junior high schools that had more
effective and intimate advisory systems (Stevenson, 1998) that could help the elementary
immersion students through this transition.
285
In my interviews, I also found that non-continuing students did not just leave the
immersion programs out of dissatisfaction with the middle/junior high school
continuation options; they also left in order to go to other specialized or selective
programs that appealed to them. Establishing International Baccalaureate (IB) programs
in schools that also housed the immersion continuation programs would be very attractive
to some students. Allowing immersion students to study another foreign language in
middle/junior high school would similarly keep some students engaged. District-level
administrators clearly need to consider not just the factors related to school environment
that cause students to leave the immersion programs, but also the factors that attract
students away from immersion programs as well.
Finally, it is also important for district-level administrators to consider that a
certain amount of attrition from immersion programs should be expected. Although it is
in the best interests of most stakeholders that all immersion students persist in the
program, many non-continuing students with whom I spoke seemed very happy with
their decision to leave the immersion program. Often, this was for social reasons; some
students simply did not feel comfortable with their peers in the immersion program, and
they seemed to be very well-served by a transition to a different educational environment.
As such, achieving a 100% persistence rate in immersion programs may not always be in
the best interests of the individual students, and district-level administrators should be
sure to position immersion programs in a situation where the students do have options
where they can gracefully leave the program.
286
2. School Administrators
As with the district-level administrators, the school administrators can also benefit
from the insights provided by this study on the topic of persistence and attrition from
immersion programs. The evidence from this study shows that building community is
key to getting students to stay motivated about and enrolled in immersion programs. Peer
influence was felt deeply by many of the students in relation to their decisions whether or
not to continue in immersion education. Often, this took the form of wanting to stay with
the close-knit peer group of the immersion program as they continued into middle/junior
high school. Occasionally, the opposite was the case: students were tired of their
immersion peer group and wanted a change. Some ideas for how to address this issue for
elementary school administrators include the following:
• Pay attention to creating and maintaining a sense of supportive community among
the immersion program participants in your school. Leading informational
sessions for students and parents about peer relationships, keeping informed about
social issues as well as academic issues in the student body, and offering students
resources like counselors can all go a long way to helping immersion students
create of a strong community with and for their peers.
• Strengthen the ties between the elementary immersion school and the
middle/junior high school housing the immersion program. This can help the
students see how they can find a place in that community as well. The evidence
in this study, as well as strong evidence from the literature on early adolescents
(Bandura, 1997), has clearly indicated that the transition from elementary school
287
to middle/junior high school can have profound effects on students’ sense of
belonging and self-efficacy. Some ideas in this regard establishing regular
elementary school visits to the middle/junior high school housing the immersion
program, sending middle/junior high school students to talk to the elementary
students, even setting up a mentorship program to help to bridge that transition.
• Recognize the complex role of parents in helping students decide whether or not
to continue. This study has shown that the parents of immersion graduates have an
influence on them that is difficult to predict, and it is certainly not unidirectional.
Because parents make the decision to enroll students in immersion programs to
begin in kindergarten, and because immersion educators work closely with
parents and students at the elementary level, there exists a reasonable assumption
that parents make the decision about whether immersion graduates continue in
immersion at the end of elementary school. At the age when students make the
transition from elementary to middle/junior high school, however, the close
influence of parents on immersion students seems to be changing (Wentzel,
1998). School administrators can benefit from this knowledge in how they
approach families about the decision whether or not to persist in the immersion
program at the middle/junior high school level. Speaking with the students
themselves is as important as, if not more important than, consulting and
convincing the parents.
School administrators in elementary immersion schools can also do a great deal to
help with the other main issue in immersion education addressed by this study:
288 establishing cross-cultural understanding in immersion students. Immersion students in
this study were not necessarily getting a clear and accurate picture of the culture(s) of the
language that they were studying, and yet one of the goals of immersion education has
long been to develop cross-cultural understanding in the students in the program. Some
ways that school administrators can do more to support this goal are the following:
• Provide opportunities for meaningful travel experiences to other countries.
Students in this study showed more cross-cultural understanding when they had
been able to not just travel to other countries, but to go beyond tourist experiences
and experience life in the target culture more profoundly. One successful school
initiative was seen in School C, which encouraged students to participate in a
penpal relationship and an exchange program with members of the target culture.
In the interviews, students spoke about these opportunities with passion and
excitement, and the immersion graduates from other schools who had been able to
visit other countries as more than tourists were often able to reflect on the nature
of culture in a way that other students could not.
• Encourage opportunities where students can create relationships with members of
the target community. Note the important role that housing teacher aides played
in some students’ discussions of members of the target community. School
administrators should continue and perhaps even enhance the opportunities for
elementary immersion program students to house members of the target culture
with them, whether that be teacher aides or exchange students affiliated with other
schools in the area.
289
In conclusion, school administrators can do a great deal to help develop
immersion programs so that they reach their stated goals more effectively. This study has
hopefully offered some insights as to how this can be done.
3. Teachers
The implications of this study for immersion teachers are certainly numerous. Of
course, the evidence that teachers’ personal qualities, rather than their instructional
practices, influenced some students’ L2 learning motivation, is important for teachers to
remember. That is certainly not to say that instructional practices are not important, but
immersion teachers can also be reassured that creating meaningful relationships with
their immersion students can benefit those students as much as effective instructional
practices with regard to the students’ L2 learning motivation.
The findings in this study also suggest a number of curricular ideas for teachers
that can address both persistence and attrition in immersion education, and developing
cross-cultural competence in immersion students. Many of these suggestions can apply
to both the elementary and the middle/junior high school contexts, so they can be useful
for teachers at a number of levels. To start with, ways that immersion teachers can
increase student L2 learning motivation, and thus, hopefully, encourage their students to
persist in immersion education:
• Foster opportunities that build community both at the elementary and
middle/junior high school levels. The students mentioned group performances,
field trips, and class projects as things that they loved about their immersion
community. Fostering those opportunities can help the students feel a sense of
290
enduring connection to their peers, and it might convince some of them to stay
with the immersion program.
• Build on students’ instrumental motivations to inspire and motivate them. Many
of the students in this study mentioned instrumental reasons for learning a
language before integrative reasons. Thus, teachers could consider units where
students examine how they have used their knowledge of the L2 as power, in both
conventional and creative ways. Early adolescents are often intrigued by
conversations where they can examine how they get and use power in their
relationships; such a unit could engage them in a developmentally-appropriate
way while still keeping them focused on the topic of language learning.
• Educate the students about racial and socioeconomic difference. This study has
suggested that some immersion students struggled with the middle/junior high
school community largely because of the racial and socioeconomic differences
that they felt with the population in that school. Giving direct instruction about
social justice and tolerance, particularly in the older elementary grades as students
are faced with the decision whether or not to continue, might help students
navigate this change with less trepidation.
The findings from this study also imply that there is more work to be done with
developing immersion students’ cross-cultural understanding. Some ways that this could
be done by elementary and middle/junior high school immersion teachers includes the
following:
291
• Develop more explicit instruction about the target culture, going beyond
celebrations and the holidays and into products, practices, and perspectives of
culture. This can go far in helping immersion students understand more beyond
the simplistic views about culture that were expressed by the students in this
study. The challenges to the implementation of these types of lessons is clear;
teaching content as well as the target language is difficult for immersion teachers
to accomplish. Including more information about culture and language might be
very difficult in some circumstances. However, an alignment of immersion
program goals with the enduring understandings that are targeted in the classroom
can ultimately create an immersion program with more integrity and better-
educated citizens of the world in the long term.
• Challenge students’ understandings of language and culture. This goes beyond
simply teaching language and culture, to teaching about the concepts of
“language” and “culture.” The creation and implementation of lessons designed
to educate immersion learners about the nature of language and culture can be
effective in dispelling some of their misconceptions, as research has shown
(Dagenais, 2008; Morgan, 1993).
• Facilitate the building of relationships between students and members of the
target culture(s) in the curriculum. The data from this study clearly showed that
students with more meaningful travel experience and interactions with members
of the target culture were more likely to display cross-cultural understandings. As
such, immersion teachers can and should encourage their students to make deep
292
and enduring connections with individuals in the target culture(s). Having guest
speakers is important, but perhaps more important would be finding a way to
actively reach out to members of the target community either locally or
internationally, in an iterative and sustained way. The pen pal initiative outlined
above is one example of such a connection; with the advent of technology like
video conferencing and real-time chatting, other possibilities could also be
pursued that would not require travel.
• Promote, or continue to promote, multicultural perspectives. This can be done by
bringing in speakers from other cultures, even beyond those cultures associated
with the immersion L2. This should go hand in hand with a consideration of how
other cultures and customs are represented in the hallways, during school events,
and on field trips.
Many immersion teachers undoubtedly already recognize and implement many of these
techniques in the classroom, and I do not intend to suggest that the teachers do not
already do a great deal to address these issues. However, as I have already stated, this
section of implications and suggestions is intended to share information and ideas above
all else. Whatever occurs beyond that is, of course, up to the teachers.
Study Limitations
Through the inclusion of five different immersion schools and more than 350
students in this study, I attempted to include as much information about as many
immersion students as possible who fit my criteria. The large number of surveys and
interviews helped me to cast a wide net for data that allowed for many different themes to
293 emerge. Furthermore, this study’s intention is not to generate findings that can be
generalized to a population. Nonetheless, it is important to note a few limitations related
to the nature of my sample. First of all, everyone who responded to the survey was
willing and eager to participate in a study on this topic. All student survey respondents
were close enough with their parent(s) that they could cooperate in the completion and
return of the surveys. Additionally, the interviewees were interested in taking the time to
meet face-to-face with a researcher. From my own personal experience with early
adolescents, I know that this is not the case for all students of this age. As such, I must
consider the sample of the population represented in this study to be somewhat rarified.
Furthermore, it is difficult to say exactly how demographically representative the sample
was of the population, since I did not collect racial or socioeconomic information about
the participants. However, because it was not a random sample, we must be warned even
more stridently against generalizing the results to the larger population of immersion
graduates from one-way programs.
The data collection procedures in this study were crafted in order to ensure the
most accurate data possible. Of course, there were some areas where it was probable that
the data were not as accurate as I would have preferred. Notably, since the students and
their parents filled out the surveys at home, I had very little control over how they
interpreted the questions and how private their answers were. Although I requested in
my instructions that the students and the parents to fill out their surveys completely
separately, I also had no control over their actions in their own homes. The second major
weakness in my data collection procedures involved the age of my student interview
294 participants and the likelihood that they did not completely understand the nature of the
confidentiality of our conversation. Compounded with the fact that many of these
interviews happened in a school setting, I imagine that at least some of the students
tempered their comments somewhat, under the suspicion that I might share my findings
in conversations with their teachers or parents. I did follow all research protocols for
educating my participants about confidentiality, use of pseudonyms, etc., but early
adolescents have the potential to misinterpret or misunderstand how those concepts might
be applied in a research setting (Stevenson, 1998). As such, or even simply because they
had just met me, the students’ responses might not have been as truthful as in other
circumstances.
Finally, there was a great deal of information about the students’ L2 learning
motivation that I did not access. I did not consult with district administrators, school
administrators, or teachers about their perspectives on immersion students’ L2 learning
motivation. Furthermore, I did not conduct any direct observations of the phenomena
reported on in this study. It is very possible that, if I had observed what the students had
reported or consulted with their teachers or administrators, I might have a different
interpretation of events. Ultimately the students’ statements must stand as they are, as a
representation of their understanding and interpretation of their reality. I feel that it is
important to consider the importance of this type of knowledge. The assumptions often
made about immersion students, their parents, and their backgrounds, have led to some
important and enduring misunderstandings about immersion education in America, many
of which have been addressed in this study. I feel that their perspective is important to
295 reveal in research, too, and I believe that it does not damage the value of the study to the
field.
Implications for Future Research
Future studies might expand on this study in a number of ways. As suggested
above, a study geared to get 100% participation of a graduating elementary immersion
class could capture the responses of individuals whose voices were not heard in this
study. More comprehensive parts of this study could and should be revisited in new
contexts and settings. It would be fascinating to explore a different immersion program
model (i.e. two-way immersion programs), age group, or sociopolitical setting (i.e. a
different part of the United States or a different country altogether) in order to see if the
findings of this study apply to different contexts in immersion education. A different
study could also explore the same L2 learning motivation but with students who did not
have the benefits of immersion education, instead focusing on early adolescents in a
traditional foreign language class.
Data gathering instruments used in this study could be refined in order to avoid
some of the gaps that emerged in the data. Writing and modifying a survey is a difficult
process, particularly when writing for a much younger population than was intended for
the original instrument. In my desire to keep the survey short and consistently formatted,
I left out some parts of the socio-educational model from my quantitative data that might
have added important elements to my study. Since writing my survey, I have discovered
some studies (see for example Worth, 2008) where the AMTB was altered differently,
296 and I would consider that work again before conducting another study with a modified
AMTB.
I am also intrigued by the idea of allowing early adolescents to have some input
into these tools; research has shown that allowing students of this age to craft instruments
for their peers is not only beneficial to the student aides, but it provides the added benefit
of offering an adult researcher language and patterns of expression that can resonate more
profoundly with the participant group (Stevenson, 1998). This might include having
students write or consult on the survey and interview questions that are asked. To take it
further, the students could also conduct the interviews themselves, in order to avoid the
conflict that results from an adult researcher’s intervention. Such a project would
certainly change some of the methodological and theoretical implications from those of
this study, but the results could certainly provide an interesting perspective on the topic
of L2 learning motivation in this context.
Finally, this study has shown that the use of qualitative methods and the
secondary theoretical frameworks beyond the socio-educational model have a great deal
to give to the field of L2 learning motivation research. Future research could and should
certainly explore these methodological and theoretical spaces in more detail.
Looking at social and psychological factors like L2 learning motivation in the
context of immersion education can help all parents, educators, and policymakers
interested in improving Americans’ ability to navigate other languages and cultures.
Immersion programs represent the vanguard of effective L2 program models in the U.S.,
297 and we must seek every opportunity to both improve and learn from them in order to
better serve the citizens of our communities and the world.
298
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Yashima, T., Zenuk-Nishide, L., & Shimizu, K. (2004). The influence of attitudes and
affect on willingness to communicate and second language communication.
Language Learning, 54(1), 119-152.
Yeon, S., & Baik, Y. (2006). Examining unsuccessful language learners: Motivation and
learning strategy. Paper presented at the American Council of Teachers of
Foreign Languages Annual Conference.
Yin, R. K. (2006). Mixed methods research: Are the methods genuinely integrated or
merely parallel? Research in the Schools, 13(1), 41-47.
326
Appendix A
Summary of Responses to Questions in First Section of Parent Survey
Paraphrased Questions Responses
Choices 0 1-3 4-10 11+ Q1. How many times have you traveled
outside of the US? % 5.3 35.2 30.5 38.9
Choices 0 1-3 4-10 11+ Q2. How many times have you traveled
outside of the US with your child? % 29.8 43.5 22.9 3.8
Choices No Yes Q3. Has parent/guardian lived outside of
US for 3 months? % 67.9 32.1
Choices No Yes Q4. Has parent lived outside of US for 3
months with your child? % 96.2 3.8
Choices No Yes Q5. Has child ever lived/traveled outside of
US without a parent/guardian? % 82.4 16.8
Choices 0 1 2 3+ Q6. How many languages besides English
spoken fluently by adults in the home? % 78.6 13.7 6.1 1.5
Choices English only Other Q7. What language did your child learn
first? % 92.4 7.6
Choices English only Other Q8. What languages are spoken in the
home? % 78.6 21.4
Choices English only Other Q9. What language does your child usually
speak in the home? % 85.5 14.5
327
Paraphrased Questions Responses
Choices No Yes
Q10. Do you have family who live outside
of the US?
% 70.2 29.8
Choices None Some Lots Q11. What is the closest contact your child
has with them? % 78.6 6.9 15.3
Choices No Yes Q12. Have you had a guest in the home
from a target country? % 39.7 60.3
Choices Friend Student Teacher Other Q13. What was their relationship with your
family? % 16.4 12.6 39.2 31.6
Choices H.S. 2-yr 4-yr Grad Q14. What was your highest degree in
education? % 9.9 3.8 45.8 39.7
Choices 0 Nov Inter Adv Fluent Q15. What is your level of proficiency in
target language? % 21.4 53.4 12.2 4.6 8.4
Choices No Yes Q16. Did child continue with immersion in
middle/junior high? % 25.2 74.8
Choices Female Male Q17. Gender of child
% 61.1 38.9
328
Appendix B
University of Minnesota IRB Approval Form
329
Appendix C
Cover Letter (English)
Dear parents/guardians of [elementary immersion school] graduate,
My name is Pam Wesely, and I am a Ph.D. student in Second Languages and Cultures Education at the
University of Minnesota. This packet contains information about a study that I am conducting about the
language learning motivation of graduates of elementary immersion school. Your child has been identified
to me as graduate of [elementary immersion school]. Whether or not your child made the decision to
continue with immersion education in [sixth/seventh] grade, your participation in this study can be very
valuable to me. My study will be much richer if I get responses from parents and students with a variety of
experiences, and a variety of levels of motivation to learn language. I hope that you will consider participating!
You have two options for participating in this study:
Option One: Surveys only.
• Complete the enclosed confidential Parent Survey on paper or online.
• Have your child complete the enclosed confidential Student Survey on paper or online.
o Please allow your child to fill this out privately, without your input, so that I can best
understand their own independent opinions.
• Sign the Consent Form, indicating that you have selected Option One, on paper or online.
• Return all of these documents to me in the attached envelope, or submit online.
• This will be the extent of your participation in this study. Thank you!
Option Two: Surveys and interviews. • Complete the enclosed confidential Parent Survey on paper or online.
• Have your child complete the enclosed confidential Student Survey on paper or online.
o Please allow your child to fill this out privately, without your input, so that I can best
understand their own independent opinions.
• Sign the Consent Form, indicating that you have selected Option Two, on paper or online.
• Return all of these documents to me in the attached envelope, or submit online.
• I will be contacting your child to schedule two 45-minute interviews.
• I will give your child a $10 Target gift card for participation in the interviews.
Please see the enclosed Consent Form for more detailed information about these options. No matter what
option you choose, all of your answers and your child’s answers will be kept confidential. All identifying information about you or your child will be changed in any final report of the study.
I appreciate the time that you have taken to read this letter and look over the enclosed materials. I hope that
you and your child will be able to participate in this study. If you have any questions, contact me at (612)
708-1920 or [email protected] or my advisor, Professor Diane Tedick at (612) 625-1081 or
Sincerely,
Pamela M. Wesely
University of Minnesota
330
Appendix D
Cover Letter (Spanish)
Queridos Padres y/o acudientes graduados del equipo de [elementary immersion school],
Mi nombre es Pam Wesely y soy candidata para Doctorado en Educación y Cultura en Segunda Lengua de
la Universidad de Minnesota. Este paquete contiene información de un estudio que estoy realizando sobre
el comportamiento acerca del aprendizaje del idioma y motivación de los graduados de primaria del
Colegio de Inmersión. Su hijo es identificado como un estudiante del Programa de [elementary immersion
school]. Su participación en este estudio es de mucha importancia; aun si todavía no han definido si su hijo
seguirá siendo parte de la educación para [grade level] grado en el equipo de Inmersión al español. Este estudio sería muy enriquecedor al lograr definir responsabilidades por parte de los padres de familia y
alumnos; basadas en experiencias y diferentes niveles de motivación durante el proceso de aprendizaje del
idioma. ¡Espero contar con su participación!
Para participar de este estudio, necesitan el material en español. Por favor contácteme directamente al 612-
708-1920 o al correo electrónico [email protected]. Las personas que realmente estén interesadas,
necesito envíen sus direcciones para poderles remitir la información necesaria.
A continuación se describe las dos opciones posibles para participar de este estudio:
Opción I: Encuesta
- Los padres deberán completar una encuesta confidencial (Parent Survey).
- Su hijo deberá completar la encuesta confidencial (Student Survey), puede ser entregada en papel o por correo electrónico.
- Por favor permita que su hijo diligencie la encuesta en privado sin su ayuda, con el fin de entender mejor su propia opinión.
- Firme la forma de consentimiento, haciendo referencia a la opción I.
- Por último, reenviar todos los documentos en el sobre adjunto o presentarlos por correo electrónico.
- De esta manera usted y su hijo serán parte de dicho estudio. ¡Muchas Gracias! Opción II: Encuesta y entrevista
- Los padres deberán completar una encuesta confidencial (Parent Survey).
- Su hijo deberá completar la encuesta confidencial (Student Survey), puede ser entregada en papel o por correo electrónico.
- Por favor permita que su hijo diligencie la encuesta en privado sin su ayuda, con el fin de entender mejor su propia opinión.
- Firme la forma de consentimiento, haciendo referencia a la opción II.
- Por último, reenviar todos los documentos en el sobre adjunto o presentarlos por correo electrónico.
- Se contactará a su hijo para programar dos entrevistas, cada una de 45 minutos
- Su hijo recibirá como incentivo por su participación de las entrevistas una tarjeta de regalo de Target
por 10 dólares.
Observe la forma de consentimiento adjunta o solicite una copia de esta forma en español para mayor
detalle de estas dos opciones. Recuerde no importa que opción haya elegido, toda la información
suministrada durante este estudio será voluntaria y confidencial. Al finalizar la investigación o estudio, su
información personal y la de su hijo serán reservadas.
Aprecio mucho el tiempo que dedicaron para leer esta carta y observar el material adjunto. Espero contar
con el apoyo de todos ustedes. Si tienen alguna pregunta al respecto no olviden contactarme, o si prefieren
lo pueden hacer directamente con mi asesora, la Profesora Diane Tedick al 612-625-1081 o al correo
electrónico: [email protected]
Sinceramente, Pamela M. Wesely, University of Minnesota
331
Appendix E
Parent Consent Form
332
Appendix F
Parent Survey
Please go to [URL] to fill out this survey online if you’d prefer.
This is your code: _____________.
Parent Survey: Language Learning Research Study All of these questions are about your child who is currently in
[sixth/seventh] grade.
Please do not consult your child as you fill this out.
Part One: Please mark the box that is next to your response to the question.
1. About how many times have you traveled outside of the United States in your lifetime?
(not including residence in another country)
! 0 ------SKIP to 3
! 1-3
! 4-10
! 11 or more
2. About how many times have you traveled with your child
outside of the United States? (not including residence in another country)
! 0
! 1-3
! 4-10
! 11 or more
3. Have you or another parent/guardian of your child ever lived for more than three months in a
country other than the United States?
! No ------ SKIP to 5
! Yes
4. (If yes) Have you or another parent/guardian ever lived with your child
for more than three months in a country other than the United States?
! No
! Yes
5. Has your child ever either lived or traveled in a country other than the United States
without you or another parent/guardian (for example, on a school trip or with an organization)?
! No
! Yes
333 6. How many languages besides English are spoken fluently by adults in your house?
! 0
! 1
! 2
! 3 or more
7. Which language(s) did your child learn first?
! English
! Other (please specify):____________________________________________
8. Which languages are spoken in your home?
! English only
! Other (please specify):____________________________________________
9. Which languages does your child usually speak in the home?
! English only
! Other (please specify):____________________________________________
10. Do you or another parent/guardian have family who live outside of the United States?
! No ------ SKIP to 12
! Yes
11. (If yes) What is the closest level of contact your child has with these
family members?
! No contact at all
! Some contact
! A great deal of contact
334
12. Have you ever had someone from a [French/Spanish]-speaking country stay in your home as a
guest for one night or more?
! No ------ SKIP to 14
! Yes
13. (If yes) What was their relationship with your family?
! Family friend
! Foreign exchange student
! Teacher or teacher’s aide in my child’s immersion school
! Other (please specify) _____________________________
14. What is the highest degree that you have obtained in your education?
! High school diploma
! 2-year college degree
! 4-year college degree
! Graduate/professional degree
15. What is your level of proficiency in [French/Spanish]?
! I do not know any [French/Spanish].
! Novice
! Intermediate
! Advanced
! Superior/Fluent
16. Is your child currently a student in the immersion program at [name of district middle/junior
high school with continuation program]?
! No
! Yes
17. Is your child male or female?
! Male
! Female
335 Part Two:
Check the box that corresponds to what you believe that your
child can do in [French/Spanish], right now. Please do not consult
your child as you answer these questions; I am interested in your
thoughts.
He/She cannot
do it at
all.
He/She can do it,
but not
very
well.
He/She can do it
pretty
well.
He/She can do it
very
well.
I don’t know if
he/she
can do it.
18. He/She can watch and understand a TV
program or video.
!
!
!
!
!
19. When he/she hears native speakers
speaking about a familiar topic, he/she can
understand everything and does not need to
hear it more than one time.
! ! ! ! !
20. He/she can understand other students when
working in a group.
! ! ! ! !
21. He/she can tell a story that he/she knows,
such as a fairytale.
! ! ! ! !
22. He/she can comfortably talk with a native
speaker about any general topic.
! ! ! ! !
23. He/she can say hello and answer questions
about his/her family and him/her.
! ! ! ! !
24. He/she can read and understand a story
written for kids his/her age.
! ! ! ! !
25. He/she can read and understand a
magazine.
! ! ! ! !
26. He/she can write about his/her life, like in
a diary entry.
! ! ! ! !
27. He/she can write a summary of a story that
he/she has read.
! ! ! ! !
336 Part Three:
Please write down your answers to these questions (continue on back
if necessary).
27. Why did you originally enroll your child in an immersion program?
28. How was the decision made whether or not your child would continue immersion education in
sixth/seventh grade? (Please describe factors in the decision, such as child preference, geographic
considerations, options to take other languages or sports, etc.)
29. Do you have any other comments that you would like to make
to clarify or expand on any of your answers above?
30. If you agree to let me interview your child for this study (OPTION 2), please provide me with
their contact information below:
Child’s name:___________________________________________
Child’s e-mail or phone number:_________________________________________
31. If you agree to let me interview your child for this study (OPTION 2), please check the boxes
next to all times when you prefer for me to meet your child. I will need to meet with your child twice,
and I will confirm all meeting times with your child well in advance.
! Before school (parent will provide transportation)
! During [another designated time during school day]
! After school (parent will provide transportation)
! Other __________________________________
Thank you very much for the time that you have spent in responding to this survey.
Please mail this survey with the student survey and your signed consent form
in the addressed, stamped envelope.
If you no longer have the envelope, please send these documents to:
Pam Wesely / 3637 Colfax Ave. S. / Minneapolis, MN 55409
337
Appendix G
Student Survey
Please go [URL] to fill out this survey online if you’d prefer.
This is your code: _____________.
Student Survey
This should be filled out independently by the [sixth/seventh] grade student
who attended [immersion elementary school name].
Please don’t let anyone else see your answers, and be honest!!
Part One Check the box next to the statement that best indicates the extent to which you disagree or agree with it.
Really
Disagree
Sort of
Disagree
Neutral Sort of
Agree
Really
Agree
1. The more that I learn about [French/Spanish]-speaking people, the more I like them.
!
!
!
!
!
2. I wish I could speak another language perfectly.
! ! ! ! !
3. Studying the [French/Spanish] language can be important for me because other people will respect me more if I know a world language.
! ! ! ! !
4. My parents tell me that the [French/Spanish] language will be important for me when I leave school.
! ! ! ! !
5. Studying a world language is enjoyable.
! ! ! ! !
6. I always feel that the other students speak [French/Spanish] better than I do.
! ! ! ! !
7. I would rather spend my time on subjects other than [French/Spanish].
! ! ! ! !
8. My parents think that I should continue studying [French/Spanish] all through school.
! ! ! ! !
9. I like the [French/Spanish]-speaking people.
! ! ! ! !
338 Really
Disagree
Sort of
Disagree
Neutral Sort of
Agree
Really
Agree
10. Studying the [French/Spanish] language can be important for me because it will make me feel more comfortable with people who speak [French/Spanish].
! ! ! ! !
11. I would really like to learn a lot of world languages.
! ! ! ! !
12. I hate the [French/Spanish] language.
! ! ! ! !
13. My parents really encourage me to study [French/Spanish].
! ! ! ! !
14. [French/Spanish]-speaking people are nice.
! ! ! ! !
15. I really enjoy learning [French/Spanish].
! ! ! ! !
16. I would like to know more [French/Spanish]-speaking people.
! ! ! ! !
17. I get nervous and confused when I speak [French/Spanish].
! ! ! ! !
18. I plan to learn [French/Spanish] for as long as possible.
! ! ! ! !
19. If I were visiting a foreign country, I would like to be able to speak the language of the people.
! ! ! ! !
20. Studying the [French/Spanish] language can be important for me because it will make me a smarter person.
! ! ! ! !
21. My parents think I should spend more time studying [French/Spanish].
! ! ! ! !
22. I never feel quite sure of myself when I am speaking in [French/Spanish].
! ! ! ! !
23. Studying the [French/Spanish] language can be important for me because it will help me to talk to different kinds of people.
! ! ! ! !
24. I would study a world language in school even if it were not required.
! ! ! ! !
25. I would like to get to know the [French/Spanish]-speaking people better.
! ! ! ! !
339 Really
Disagree
Sort of
Disagree
Neutral Sort of
Agree
Really
Agree
26. Studying [French/Spanish] can be important to me because I think it will someday be useful in getting a good job.
! ! ! ! !
27. When I leave high school, I’m not going to study [French/Spanish] any more.
! ! ! ! !
28. Most [French/Spanish]-speaking people are friendly.
! ! ! ! !
29. My parents want me to learn the [French/Spanish] language.
! ! ! ! !
30. Learning [French/Spanish] is really great.
! ! ! ! !
31. It is important for Americans to learn world languages.
! ! ! ! !
32. [French/Spanish]-speaking people have interesting cultures.
! ! ! ! !
33. In class, I get embarrassed answering questions in [French/Spanish].
! ! ! ! !
34. My parents encourage me to practice my [French/Spanish] as much as possible.
! ! ! ! !
35. Studying [French/Spanish] can be important for me because then I can talk to other kids who speak [French/Spanish].
! ! ! ! !
36. Learning [French/Spanish] is a waste of time.
! ! ! ! !
37. The more I get to know [French/Spanish]-speaking people, the more I want to be fluent in their language.
! ! ! ! !
38. I enjoy meeting and listening to people who speak other languages.
! ! ! ! !
39. I am afraid the other students will laugh at me when I speak [French/Spanish].
! ! ! ! !
40. I love learning [French/Spanish]. ! ! ! ! !
Please turn the page to continue with Part Two!
340
Part Two:
Check the box that best describes what you can do in [French/Spanish], right now.
I
cannot
do it at all.
I can
do it,
but not very
well.
I can
do it
pretty well.
I can
do it
very well.
I don’t
know if
I can do it.
41. I can watch and understand a TV program or
video.
!
!
!
!
!
42. When I hear native speakers speaking on a
familiar topic, I can understand everything and do not
need to hear it more than one time.
!
!
!
!
!
43. I can understand other students when working in a
group.
!
!
!
!
!
44. I can tell a story that I know, such as a fairytale.
!
!
!
!
!
45. I can comfortably talk with a native speaker about
any general topic.
!
!
!
!
!
46. I can say hello and answer questions about my
family and me
!
!
!
!
!
47. I can read and understand a story written for kids
my age.
!
!
!
!
!
48. I can read and understand a magazine.
!
!
!
!
!
49. I can write about my life, like in a diary entry.
!
!
!
!
!
50. I can write a summary of a story that I have read.
!
!
!
!
!
You are done! Thank you for participating in my
study!
341
Appendix H
Student Assent Form
Dear student, My name is Pam Wesely. I would like to invite you to participate in a study that I am doing about students like you, who went to an elementary immersion school. This sheet will explain my study, and then you can sign it at the bottom if you agree to participate. The purpose of this study is to find out about how you feel about studying a foreign language. If you agree to be in the study, I’ll ask you to:
1. First, I’ll ask to interview you by yourself for about 45 minutes. In this interview, I will ask you questions about your thoughts about studying foreign languages. I’ll be recording you and taking notes, too.
2. Next, on a different day, I might ask to talk with you again for about 45 minutes with a few other students in a group interview. In that interview, I’ll ask you to cooperate with other students to discuss and answer questions together.
I will keep all of your answers private. When I write about this study, I will change your name and hide your identity so that no one can recognize you. I will give you a $10 gift card to Target, once you have finished the first interview. There are no other immediate or expected benefits for being in the study. You can say you do not want to continue in the study at any time, even in the middle of the interview, and I will not be angry with you. Saying “no” will not affect how other people (like teachers, anyone else at your school, or people at the University of Minnesota) feel about you. You may ask any questions you have now. If you have questions later, you can ask me the next time we meet.Please sign below, saying that you are willing to be in this study. Your signature:_________________________________Date:______________________ My signature: _________________________________Date:______________________
342
Appendix I
Individual Student Interview Protocol
Before we start, I just want to remind you that everything you say is confidential.
That means that I won’t talk about it with anyone – not your teachers or your parents, not
anyone. Remember, you don’t have to answer every question if you don’t want to. I’m
going to record it on this recorder here, but no one will hear it but me. When I write my
paper about this study, I might quote you, but I will give you another name and make
sure that I have hidden your identity. Do you have a name you want me to use for you?
Okay, let’s get started. I’m going to ask you some questions that I have written
down. I might ask you some other questions, too, or ask you to explain one of your
answers more.
- Let’s talk about learning in [French/Spanish].
Tell me some things that you like and don’t like about learning in
[French/Spanish]. What is your favorite thing and your least favorite
thing?
Now think about other students in [French/Spanish] immersion. Tell me some
things that other kids like and don’t like about learning in
[French/Spanish]. You can talk about your friends, or things you hear
other kids say, or just things that you think other kids think.
Tell me some memories or stories about being in the [French/Spanish] immersion
program. It can be a good memory or a bad memory, or both. Do you
remember a time when you were frustrated, or really happy, or having a
343
lot of fun? Why do you think that you remember this so much? Are there
any other things you really remember?
Have you ever been really proud about the fact that you can communicate in
[French/Spanish]? Have you ever been nervous about communicating in
[French/Spanish]?
- Let’s talk about the decision you made about [continuing/not continuing] in the
immersion program this year.
Can you talk to me about why you decided to [continue/not continue] in the
[French/Spanish] immersion program in seventh grade?
Can you imagine a reason why you would have made the opposite decision
instead?
Now let’s think back to when you and your friends were making the decision to
continue or not. Imagine that you decided to [continue/not continue], but
your friend isn’t sure. What would you say to convince them to
[continue/not continue] with you?
How do you think [French/Spanish] immersion students are different from the
other students in this school? Have you ever noticed any differences?
How would you describe a typical [French/Spanish] immersion student,
and a typical student who is not in immersion?
- Let’s talk about some of your opinions about things relating to studying
[French/Spanish].
344
Talk to me about the [French/Spanish] language. Do you think it’s good to know
[French/Spanish]? Why? Is it helpful? Why or why not? How is it
helpful or not helpful?
Tell me about [French-speaking/Spanish-speaking] people that you know. What
are they like?
What about other languages? Have you thought about studying another
language? Which one? Why?
In general, do you think it’s important or good for people to learn a second
language? Why or why not?
Do you think your parents would agree most of the stuff you’ve said in this
interview? Do they encourage you? Tell me about how they talk about
you studying [French/Spanish].
- Do you have anything else you’d like to add to this interview?